His Holiness Pope Tawadros II, this evening, and the church delegation accompanying His Holiness visited the Vatican Museum, which is a few meters away from the Santa Marta House, the residence of His Holiness in the Vatican City.

His Holiness and his companions toured the corridors of the museum and listened to a detailed explanation of its contents and the history of the artifacts in it, as the museum contains 70,000 paintings, sculptures, statues and other artifacts, of which 20,000 are on display.
The visit started from the Apollo Belvedere statue, which is a marble statue and is considered one of the most amazing ancient statues ever, as it was the first piece in the Vatican art collection even before the establishment of the Vatican Museums. It was a favorite statue of Napoleon Bonaparte, and he took it with him to the Louvre, but after his defeat, the statue was returned to the Vatican. Then H.H. visited the Sala Rotunda room, which is similar to the Pantheon in Paris, but smaller in size ; it was interesting to see the oculus in the ceiling and the ornate roses in the dome, the floor decorated with mosaics dating back to the second century and the Porphyry basin in the center, and it was surprising that these intricate designs were intact and did not lose their colors.
H.H. also visited the Borgia Apartments, which consisted of six rooms decorated by the Italian painter Pinturicchio, at the request of Pope Alexander VI, painting the frescoes between 1492 and 1494.
This was followed by a visit to the four rooms of Raphael, which are located directly above the Borgia apartments, where Raphael began decorating these rooms in 1508, but he couldn’t finish the job. After Raphael’s death in 1520, his assistants finished the Sala di Costagnino, the last room along with the frescoes for Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael’s work in these rooms represents the High Renaissance in Rome.
At the end of the tour, H.H. visited the Sistine Chapel at the end of the Vatican Museums. Here is The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo..between 1508 and 1512, Michelangelo painted nine scenes from the Book of Genesis on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. The most famous painting in this series is The Creation of Adam. In terms of popularity, it is equal to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
The Sistine Chapel also hosts another masterpiece by Michelangelo – The Last Judgment, which covers the altar wall of the church and is one of the most beautiful paintings of the Vatican Museum.
The Last Judgment was painted between 1535 and 1541 when Michelangelo was in his sixties.
The walls of the Sistine Chapel contain masterpieces by many Renaissance artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Pinturicchio, Pietro Perugino and Domenico Ghirlandaio.

This page is also available in: العربية