Vatican Sculpture

Moving on from the Sistine, our main interest was the paintings, but we had to linger a bit with the sculptures, mostly 1st or 2nd century Roman copies of now-lost Greek originals.

Laocoon

Belvedere Apollo

Belvedere Hermes

Part of one of several "animal" rooms

A colossal Hercules that once stood in Pompey's theatre

Nice bowl (seats twelve); nice mosaic

Vicki poses by a statue of the Emperor Claudius (she's read a lot of 
Robert Graves lately)

Incredibly beautiful porphyry sarcophagus that held the body of St. Helen; 
Constantine's mom, who brought Christianity into the imperial family; and to all 
the rest of us

The Verospi Augustus

Sistina Cappella

The Sistine Chapel was crowded as usual, but we found places to sit, study our guidebooks and gaze at the ceiling and walls with our monocular and binoculars. I am almost too embarrassed to post my poor pix because: a) there is a host of excellent ones at the Vatican Museums site and also all over the web, and b) because the Sistine Chapel has an enforced no pix policy. There are always a few guards patrolling the room, indelicately shushing everyone down to a low roar and shouting "no photos" every few minutes. Always in English. As soon as their backs are turned, the cameras resume until some moron who doesn't know how to turn the flash off blasts the ceiling again.

The famous ceiling frescoes

The one photo everyone gets

The last judgment; I like my last judgments more on the lurid side, so I am not a 
big fan of this one; nor of Michaelangelo generally; the last judgment was done 
many years after the ceiling and after the 1527 Sack of Rome, officially, the end

of the Renaissance, in Italy at least; everyone was in a bad mood; later Popes had 
clothes painted on Michaelangelo's nudes

Up closer; this guy was damned for reading

too many eye charts

Love those grotesque mid-turn poses; Daniel

The Delphic Sibyll, one we like

The side frescoes were done a generation earlier (than Michaelangelo) by 
Botticelli and others; here, the temptations of Christ

Handing over the keys to St. Peter

Side frescoe detail; another Holy Circumcision; yes, I have read David Farley's 
An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest 
Town, actually a very good book

We had lunch at the Sistine Bar; alas, it was Friday, so no 
cheeseburger; also no beer, but the espresso was OK

Papal Apartments/Rafael Rooms

The older papal apartments are now called the Rafael Rooms, several of them, noted for some of the most famous paintings of western art. Every square inch of the large halls is covered in Renaissance art and ornamentation, mostly by Rafael and his students, and I'll just post a few favorites.

The Constantine Room is covered in giant murals about the
Emperor Constantine, who legalized Christianity (Justinian

criminalized all other religions a century later); the ceiling, by

Tommaso Laureti is titled "The Triumph of Christianity Over

Paganism" and has always epitomized for me the Church's

historic intolerance and contempt for the older civilizations
...onto which it grafted itself as soon a possible

Rafael's "Expulsion of Heliodorus" (Protestants: you'll have

to find and read the Book of Maccabees to appreciate this)

Pope Leo the Great meets Attila the Hun at the gates of

Rome; after a brief (armed) fly-by of SS Peter and Paul,

Attila decides to maybe sack some other place; actually, the

meeting occurred near Mantua; interestingly, the worst sack

of Rome occurred in 1527, under ther auspices of the Holy
Roman Emperor, His Most Catholic Excellency King
Charles V of Spain; always stranger than fiction...

Right after the triumph of Christianity over paganism

and Seleucids and Huns, one enters a room glorifying the

ancients; here, one of Rafael's greatest hits, "The School of

Athens," with Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Diogenes,

Pythagoras, Archimedes, et aliud; a time when the Church

was trying to appropriate what it could of the ancient world

Closer up: the guy in the foreground left, lavender tunic, was

added later--Rafael's flattering portrait of his contemporary

Michaelangelo

And Rafael himself, right corner, black hat

Not least of Rafael's problems in doing these rooms was the

challenge of working around doors, windows, HVAC, et

cetera; here is the great painting of the arts, literature, and

music, Apollo and the 7 (9? 12? 40?) muses, blind Homer in

blue on the left, and an interesting prominence for Sappho,

lower left

And then there's the ceiling with all the roundel things (a

causal theory of knowledge espoused here?)

En Route to the Sistine Chapel

It's a big place, the Vatican Museums. Many buildings, thousands of rooms, millions of treasures. Just making a bee-line from the entrance to the Sistine Chapel takes you past a seeming mile of objects that would be prize possessions for most of the world's museums.

One of many old buildings on the beautiful grounds

Another Artemis from Ephesus

A beautiful and beautifully-preserved sarcophagus with busts and more

Mosaic still-life

Another Socrates

In the tapestry hall

Entering the hall of maps, giant wall-sized maps of 17th century Italy; the ceiling 
ornamentation isn't bad, either

Italia antiqua

Campagnia and the Bay of Naples

Venice

Papal parking

"Passport, please; wait a moment...you seem to have exceeded your 90-day 
Schengen Agreement limit; I'm afraid you cannot pass!"

Return to Vatican City

We had an 11:30 Friday morning admission to the Vatican Museums and were on the bus and in a thick traffic jam by 9 AM. When we got to the Laurentina Metro station, it was closed: a Metro transit worker strike! Perhaps the gods really don't want us to see the Vatican Museums, we began to think. But we joined forces with a Swedish couple who had found a bus, already quite crowded, headed into the city center, and hopped aboard. An hour later we hopped off, within walking distance, we thought, of the Vatican.

The bus passed right by the Pyramide, a monument put up by

an emperor or general in the later Empire

Interestingly, one does see Mussolini's name here and there

And everywhere in the old city, there are plots well below

street level, filled with ruins

This one, the "Sacred Area of Largo Argentina," is a whole

city block; four temple ruins

We have become far more discriminating about

whom we ask for directions; Vicki figured

these ladies might know which bus went to

Vatican City

The bus they recommended took us right to St. Peter's

And after another walk, the Vatican Museums,
and, no lines!



Finally, we're in, stopping at the first of many, many gift

stores

Santa Maria del Populo

On the northern side of the Piazza de Populo is the church of St. Mary del Populo, one of Bernini's architectural creations, where many of the era's elite Romans were buried, and also home to two more very famous Caravaggios.

Santa Maria del Populo

The dome

(Annibale) Caracci's Assumption (we like

the Caracci bros)

The church has two Caravaggios, facing each

other in a closed chapel, maybe 12 feet apart;
hardly viewable, and no pix, too (this and others

snagged off of Wikipedia); this is his crucifixion
of St. Peter; again demonstrating Caravaggio's
fondness for butt-shots

And this his "conversion on the road to

Damascus"; a horse butt-shot; I rest my case