Vatican Museums

In 1506, workers digging in a Roman vineyard unearthed a remarkable marble sculpture: a Trojan priest and his two sons struggling desperately against sea serpents. Pope Julius II recognised the importance of the Laocoön and promptly bought it. The sculpture still stands in the Vatican's Octagonal Court, an early acquisition in what would become one of the world's greatest art collections. Julius had excellent taste and the means to indulge it. Fortunately, several of his successors did too.

The Vatican Museums are a fascinating record of papal ambition, where art, faith, scholarship and power have been intertwined for centuries. Marble courtyards lead to frescoed chambers, painted ceilings and corridors of almost unreasonable splendour. In the 120 metre Gallery of Maps, commissioned by Gregory XIII, forty remarkably detailed maps depict the Italian peninsula long before Italy became a unified country. Look up and the geography is almost forgotten beneath an exuberant ceiling of gilded stucco and frescoes. Apparently, even a corridor deserved the full Renaissance treatment.

In Julius II's former library, Raphael gathered the great thinkers of antiquity in *The School of Athens*. Plato and Aristotle occupy the centre, while a brooding Heraclitus bears the features of Michelangelo, who was busy working nearby. Raphael also slipped his own portrait into the gathering. At twenty something, he evidently felt comfortable in distinguished company.

And then there is the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo's *Creation of Adam* is familiar from countless reproductions, but the muscular, twisting figures across the ceiling are something else in person. His monumental *Last Judgement* covers the altar wall, while earlier frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino and Ghirlandaio deserve more attention than they generally receive. This is still where popes are elected. Photography is forbidden, silence is requested, and the occasional instruction from a guard competes with the murmuring crowd.

Crowds, in fact, are the Vatican's greatest drawback. The succession of masterpieces can become exhausting, especially when everyone is heading for the same famous ceiling. Book ahead, allow several hours and resist the urge to see everything. Make time for the Pinacoteca, where Leonardo's unfinished *Saint Jerome* and Raphael's *Transfiguration* offer two very different expressions of artistic genius. The former, with its exposed anatomy and unsettling intensity, is particularly compelling. After all the gilding and grandeur, a painting left unfinished can still stop you in your tracks.