Pinacoteca Vaticana
Museum · Vatican City, Vatican City
The picture gallery of the Vatican Museums, in its own building on the museum itinerary and covered by the Museums ticket. It holds 460 paintings in eighteen rooms, arranged by chronology and school from the Primitives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the nineteenth century; the artists the Museums name include Giotto, Fra Angelico, Melozzo da Forli, Perugino, Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio and Crespi.
History
Pius VI made a first collection of 118 paintings around 1790, broken up when the Treaty of Tolentino of 1797 sent works to Paris. The idea of a public gallery dates from 1817, after the returns that followed the Congress of Vienna. The present building was designed by Luca Beltrami for Pius XI and inaugurated on 27 October 1932, standing isolated in the nineteenth-century Square Garden and surrounded by avenues so that it could be lit from every side.
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