More Vatican Museum, 2013

It really is a pretty incredible place. In addition to all the usual favorites, we also took in a few new sections.

Vicki has always liked the Music-making Angels and Cherubs

Something you can't see at St. Peter's...close up, on this copy of the Pieta, Mary's
sash, where, in a fit of pique (no one could believe a 24-year-old could do this and
it was being attributed to other sculptors), Michaelangelo chiseled his name
("Michaelangelo Buonarotti of Florence Made This")

Up close of Raphael's Transfiguration, recently restored

Vicki says it is an excellent Egypt collection

Mosaic floor in the huge Sala Rotunda

Beautiful mosaics and in-lays all over

A detail from the great hall of maps...a ship bringing one of the many Egyptian
obelisks that now adorn Rome and the Vatican

In the Raphael Rooms, the Doctors of the Church, which no one ever looks at
because they are facing the School of Athens; embedded on the lower right,
in black, nearly obscured, but unmistakably...

Savanarola; evidently someone on Team Raphael had reformist sympathies 

Ceiling, same room, across from Apollo, the Muses, and Homer and Sappho, Poetry 
(Rebecca note)

In the Borgia Apartments, which we think we had not seen before, impressive
frescoes by Pinturicchio, a generation before Team Raphael

Interesting how much difference a generation makes sometimes

Also how much difference the change from Borgia to Medici Pope can make...

Lastly, before returning to the Sistine Chapel, we tarried in the
contemporary art section; here, Alice Lok Cahana's powerful
No Names; the road to Auschwitz, some claim, went through
the Vatican

We had visited the Sistine Chapel earlier in the day and had studied the
Botticellis and others that interested us (we are so over Mr. Twisty's ceiling
and Last Judgment), but wanted to return for a last look; alas, it was 4PM
or so and the chapel was so dark people were bumping into each other, with
no chance of seeing what they had come to see...perhaps saved
or sacrificed to see...a sad ending to an otherwise good day