A visit to Vatican City is a must for any tourist in Rome and especially for those with an interest in art. What started as a small collection of sculptures has, over the centuries, transformed into a museum complex featuring one of the finest art collections in the world.

Naturally, the visit to Vatican is high on our priority list when we visited Rome recently. The entrance of Vatican was swarming with people and we also joined the milling crowds along with our guide.

The Vatican Palaces (with over 1,400 rooms) houses the Vatican Museums brimming not only with Roman sculptures, Renaissance paintings, Flemish tapestries and Etruscan pots, but also with a collection of Modern Religious Art and Contemporary Art. However, the one thing that most of the first time visitors are keen to view are the frescoes of the vaults of the Sistine Chapel painted by the great Italian master, Michaelangelo. It is another matter that the Sistine Chapel is at the end of the five-hour tour of the Vatican!

I will highlight a few of the art treasures here, beginning with the Octagonal Court’s big marble bathtubs and statues under circular porches. The most famous statues here are Apollo Belvedere and that of Laocoon and his sons. Laocoon was a priest who had warned the Trojans about the Greek horse, asking them to set it on fire as it was a trick. According to the ancient Greek and Roman mythology, Athena was furious with him and blinded Laocoon, sending two giant sea serpents to strangle him and his sons.

A view of the Sistine Chapel depicting the themes of Creation, Original Sin and Redemption

Moving further to the Sala degli Animali (Hall of Animals), we came across beautiful animal sculptures and mosaics. It was interesting to see the sculpture of Romulus and his twin brother Remus suckling on a female wolf after they were abandoned — depicting the famous legend of the city of Rome, in which Romulus names the city after himself after killing his brother after an argument. One would pass the broken sculpture, the Belvedere Torso, without giving it much thought if it was not known that it provided inspiration to Michaelangelo while painting the figures in the Sistine Chapel. The statue might be that of Hercules seated on the hide of a panther.

Coming into the Round Hall, a huge red basin made of volcanic rock in the centre becomes the focus of the visitors. All around it colossal statues stand in a series of niches near the wall supporting the hemispherical vault imitating that of the Pantheon. The famous bronze Hercules statue here is spectacular. Walking through other galleries and artefacts we came to the Gallery of Tapestries where beautiful Flemish tapestries took my breath away. These were made in Brussels from drawings by Raphael’s pupils. Some of them depict Roman culture while others depict Biblical stories.

Rumana Husain writes about Vatican City and its vast collections of art and religious artefacts

After passing more rooms and a mind-boggling quantity of paintings, maps, books, sculptures, etc, we explored the four ‘Raphael Rooms’. As we know, Raphael was another Italian master, no less talented or famous than Michelangelo. The rooms are full of his amazing frescoes. In 1508 Pope Julius II wanted to finish the decorations of his apartments started by Signorelli and Piero della Francesca but interrupted shortly afterwards. He commissioned young Raphael to complete the suite. Following Raphael’s death in 1520, his assistants finished the project.

‘The Tree of Life’ paper cut-outs for stained glass windows in the Chapel of the Rosary by Henry Matisse

Before moving on to other apartments and ultimately to the Sistine Chapel, it was a treat to view the contemporary art collection. Luckily for us, fewer visitors to the Vatican Museums come to view this as most head directly towards the Sistine Chapel.

There is a small Van Gogh ‘Pieta’ in blue and yellow hues in a hallway, showing the Virgin Mary with Christ’s tortured dead body. The door to the small gallery is just past a sculpture of Rodin’s ‘Le Penseur’. It has all the hallmarks of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes and colours. In any other museum in the world this work, a quiet and meditative piece, would be a show stopper.

Further on in this wing there are almost 800 representative works of over 200 international artists, including Paul Gauguin, Salvador Dali, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, Georges Roualt, Ernst Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.

Three giant collages and other works depict the creative genius of the French artist Henri Matisse who has been given a permanent home in the Vatican Museums. Matisse played a leading role in many of the great changes in art in the 20th century and though he was not religious, he began to work on the Chapel of the Rosary in Venice in southeastern France in 1948. He designed every detail, from the architecture to the furniture. On display from the Rosary Chapel are models for the stained-glass windows that Matisse made in the collage style for which he was famous, and the original drawing of a large ‘Mother and Child’ surrounded by leaf decorations for the chapel.

Finally, after relishing these works, we headed to view the crème de la crème of the Vatican attraction — the Sistine Chapel, masterpiece of the Biblical art. Built at the end of the 15th century by Giovannino de Dolci, the Sistine Chapel is an imitation of Noah’s Ark. Having read about it as an art student all those years ago and now viewing it, I was hard pressed to imagine the painstaking work that Renaissance artists undertook to paint frescoes on large ceilings, vaults and walls. Whether Michalangelo, Raphael, Mantegna, Correggio or Leonardo, their works evoke admiration and awe in equal measures.

The walls on the left of the Sistine Chapel have scenes from the life of Moses and on the right, from the life of Jesus. Perugino, Botticelli and others have painted these frescoes. However, the greatest frescoes are the ones for the vaults painted by Michelangelo for Pope Julius II between 1508 and 1512, and the ‘Last Judgment’ painted for Pope Paul III around 1540. He executed these works alone and in uncomfortable positions.

The Sistine Chapel was restored between 1980 and 1994. It is climate controlled, with an air-conditioning system installed in the mid-1990s, designed for only half the number of current visitors, which now ranges from 20,000 to 30,000 per day. Vatican is installing a powerful new system which will be operational by the end of this year.

Vatican’s classical art collection is regarded among the most valuable in the world and there has been a demand by social and political activists that it should sell it and give the money to the poor as Jesus was the poorest of the poor. However, Vatican is unlikely to divest its wealth, asserting that the Church has the duty to conserve these art works in the name of the Italian state and cannot sell them.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 2nd, 2014