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There is no surer way to escape from the world than art.

But there's no surer bond to it than art.

To see the whole world's amazement contained in just one place.

To feel yourself enveloped by the wonders of creation at a single glance.

To discover the mystery of the sheerest inspiration.

To experience the desire of the great artists of every age

to reflect divine perfection.

There's the past, the present

and the future contained in the Vatican Museums.

Over 500 years of history,

one of the greatest treasures of humanity.

Remnants of an ancient and mysterious world

that wants to tell its story.

The story of the Vatican Museums,

of the Popes who wanted them.

And at the same time,

our history.

Have you ever asked yourself why we speak of the Popes Museums in the plural?

We say Ofecia Museum,

Lourdes Museum,

we speak of the Prado in Madrid

and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

But in this case we say,

we must say,

the Vatican Museums.

The reason why is because right from the beginning,

the Popes Museums had the function of representing the comprehensive

whole of everything produced by the hand of man.

Unique, artistic man,

a metaphoric figure in some ways comparable to God the creator.

Because just as God created the world from the void,

so the artist creates something radically new from the matter

shaped by his hands.

And we shall find together,

doing so in a most effective way,

thanks to the visual technique of 3D,

the third dimension.

Because when it comes to artworks,

you have to get inside them,

you have to touch them.

We shall talk about the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance

and those of Greco-Roman art.

Everything that human artistry,

the talent and genius of mankind have produced,

the Popes have wanted to preserve.

This is very important and must be understood from the onset.

Because this is how the Vatican Museums were born.

Dust,

ashes,

for some just an instant in the vast circle of life.

And yet, our every day is spent trying to elevate ourselves from that dust

to confront what dominates our thoughts.

Divine perfection.

In the Ennead,

Virgil narrates that the priest, Laacorn,

challenged the goddess Minerva.

The punishment of the gods was terrible.

Virgil writes,

First, the serpents throw themselves

in the small bodies of his two sons

and then coil around Laacorn himself,

squeezing him in huge coils.

He tries to tear away the knots with his hands

soaked with ghastly blood and dread poison.

He sends terrible cries heavenward

into the bellowing of bulls.

When it was discovered in 1506, in a vineyard just outside of Rome,

Pope Julius II of the della Rovere family

had the Laacorn brought to the papal palace

for placement in what would become

the courtyard of the statues.

Marking the beginning of what today

we call the Vatican Museums.

The public of the time was disconcerted

by the exceptional truthfulness of this marble martyrdom,

which right from the start was hailed as one of the major works

in the entire history of art.

The Laacorn is the beginning of a journey.

The journey of humankind to discover a forgotten past

that contains a future yet to be written.

Here we are in a deliberate and conscious celebration of Roman glory.

The classical world that enters the home of the Pope of Rome.

And this is important because the Popes considered themselves,

in a certain sense,

the legitimate heirs of classical civilization.

First there was the empire of Augustus, of Trajan, of Hadrian.

Then, said the Renaissance popes, there will be the imperium sine fine,

the everlasting empire of the Roman Catholic Church.

This is why we find more Greco-Roman sculptures here in the Vatican Museums

than in any other museum in the world.

Going through the collections of classical statues of the Vatican Museums

is like taking a plunge in the oceans of time.

We feel dwarfed by the powerful figures

stunned by the murmurs of stone and by its gaze

in an endless, undecipherable rhythm.

The imperium sine fine

seems to recite the Augustus of Prima Porta,

a symbol of absolute power,

whose potency remains intact even today.

The grim countenance and raised arm,

which imposes silence before the battle,

intimidate as though in the presence of a Greek god

made of stone and light.

By one's gaze wanders over the mystic allegory and scenes of military victory

that decorate the lorica or cuirass.

The depictions are so intense as to seem illusions produced by a magic lantern.

Spectres of light that inflame our thoughts.

Auguste Rodin once said that

the artist must strike a spark

and then let himself be consumed

by the fire of his own creation.

Certainly that's what happened with Francesco Franzoni,

a sculptor summoned in 1788 by Pope Pius VI

to reconstruct the horses that pulled the splendid chariot

dating from the first century AD.

Even today, in this small room,

one breathes the power of the two steeds

dashing in a race towards infinity.

So real that their thundering hoof-boots,

a name, can be heard.

A spark, an idea that comes from the distant past.

How willing are we to dash into the unknown

and to look within ourselves

in the name of beauty?

In the dense silence of dawn, Hercules reawakens.

The languid giant

is captured at the moment when he's gathering his strength

after the rest following the celebrated labors.

According to a legend,

when Pope Julius II, a broad-minded man of volcanic temperament,

came across this work,

he found it too damaged to compete with an alcohol,

and so he asked his most ingenious collaborator to restore it.

But Michelangelo Buonarroti refused.

That hauntingly perfect body and that vibrant lump of marble

that was once a head are a true revelation.

If we think of the frescoes

that Michelangelo would later paint on the vault of the Sistine Chapel,

we see that there is an immediate echo of the art of antiquity

in the nudes of the Sistine Chapel.

And we can understand how, before such a work,

a great artist like Michelangelo found his way.

Thanks to his encounter with the Lacombe and the Belvedere Torso,

Michelangelo finally understood what he had to do.

Release the life trapped within the marble.

Restless and tormented, voluble and disdainful of convention,

Michelangelo had come to the Pope's court at the age of 23,

determined to challenge the perfection of the masterworks of the past.

And he succeeded in doing so at once

with one of his most famous works, the Pietà.

The mother, childlike, gentle and resigned,

holds her son as though he had fallen asleep.

This Virgin has the same delicate features

found in Michelangelo's recurrent memories of his mother,

who died when he was still a child.

The splendid cast, conserved at the museums,

perfectly expresses the epic-making force of a masterwork

that would influence generations of artists.

The fact that at first it was thought to be a classical work

prompted Michelangelo to inscribe his name

seal-like on the ribbon of the Virgin's dress,

the only signature of an unequalled career.

With the Pietà, Michelangelo finally leaves behind

the influence of another great artist who often crossed his path,

Leonardo da Vinci.

Is it really possible to capture the secret of life?

In Leonardo's view,

the more familiar one is

with the essence of the elements of creation,

the closer one comes to the mystery of God.

Like a prodigious architect,

he shapes life and death, truth and symbol,

in one of his most controversial and famous works,

Saint Jerome.

Unfinished, it was turned into a shoemaker's stool in the 17th century

and rediscovered two centuries later.

The adventurous history of Saint Jerome does not obscure its force.

The vibrant gesture of the arm,

the suffering face and the secret shining in the saint's hollow eyes

have all the anxiety of reality.

Leonardo outlines the perspectives

that would lead to a new conception of art,

turning form into emotional expression

and building on the great intuition of the father of Italian painting.

Giotto.

Ascetic as Saint Jerome and revolutionary as Dante Alighieri,

Giotto painted the Stefaneschi triptych

as an altarpiece for the old Basilica of Saint Peter's,

demonstrating that he drank eagerly at the fountain of life

of Saint Francis' doctrine.

Christ and the saints are faces marked by real life

and shaped by faith.

On both the front and back of the altarpiece,

the bodies seem to instinctively find their place

in the typically Byzantine gold that represents paradise,

but serves Giotto, above all, as a background

against which to make the truth

of a three-dimensional world emerge.

Giotto brings God closer to mankind,

revolutionizing art and discovering for the first time

the passions of the human face.

Three centuries later, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

put the teachings of his great masters to good use.

As with Giotto, Leonardo and Michelangelo,

Caravaggio's work broke with the past,

shocked contemporaries and paved the way for the future.

In the descent,

the sacredness of the moment emerges from the darkness,

pierced by a primordial light

that lends the figures a unique, dramatic touch.

As always, Caravaggio's saints are poor derelicts

taken from off the street,

without halos and lacerated by earthly suffering.

And yet Christ has the serenity of a man

who has died in the sleep of the righteous.

The delicately abandoned arm

is a clear reference to Michelangelo's pieta,

while with three fingers

he lightly touches the tombstone

that will seal him in the dust.

Three, the same number of days

that separate him from the resurrection.

If his life was tormented and marked by incomprehension,

Caravaggio proved to have deeply sensed

the meaning of Christianity.

The sole light in his dark and self-destructive world

that seemed to compel him

to paint every work as though it were his last.

With him, a new anxiety is touched off

that would explode centuries later

with modern art.

Past, present, future.

Any artist capable of revolutionizing the art of his time

seems to speak a unique language

that adds a new piece

to a great mosaic

at once ancient and modern.

Karl Krauss once said,

art is what the world will become

and not what the world is.

But to what extent

does the art of the past speak to our time?

And how would it influence our future?

There are important dates in the history of the Vatican Museums.

The first is 1506,

when Alcon was discovered,

marking the beginning of the Greco-Roman statue collection.

Another date to remember is 1973,

when Pope Paul VI of the Montini family

inaugurated the gallery of modern religious art.

This was a steady objective of the policy of Pope Paul VI.

He was a very refined intellectual.

Familiar with the contemporary world,

he had an obsession.

The huge gap

separating modern art from the Church.

The dream he made come true.

The exploit, in some ways,

rash that he managed during his papacy

was to lay the foundations for reconciliation

between the Catholic Church and the art world.

Forty years after the inauguration,

the tormented dialogue between old and contemporary art and religion

still vibrates in the rooms of the Gallery of Modern Religious Art.

It's a rhapsodic and unpredictable collection,

where one is struck by the power of new and provocative ideas

with which, after centuries,

artists go back to measuring themselves

against the greatness of God.

In 1899, a year before he died,

Vincent van Gogh, confined in a mental asylum,

painted incessantly.

There was one work hat obsessed him,

the Pietà by Eugene Delacroix.

But why?

What was he looking for?

His tormented life

and the violent brushstrokes of his most famous works

are attenuated in this small, precious Pietà.

Van Gogh's Virgin Mary has the worn features of a peasant woman,

who with calloused hands offers the world her dead son

for the salvation of all.

This Christ does not have the calm features of the original,

but features hardened by the worries and isolation

that afflicted Van Gogh himself.

In every brushstroke,

he sends Van Gogh's profound desire to rediscover God,

to open the doors of the mental asylum and to escape

from his state as an outcast and prisoner.

In a letter to his brother Theo,

Vincent writes,

God is like an eclipsed beacon,

and it is certain that in this moment

we are in an eclipse.

That does not prevent us from feeling a terrible need for,

I shall call it by its name, religion.

And so I go out at night

to paint the stars.

60 years later,

Russian Jew Mark Chagall,

one of Pope Francis' favorite artists,

followed the trail blazed by Van Gogh

with his red Pietà.

The echoes of Michelangelo detonate in a red

that represents the blood shed by Christ on the cross,

capable of saving the world from a tangle of horrors and atrocities

that evoke those of World War II.

In the Vatican museums,

the old slips into the new

and art becomes timeless sublime prayer.

In the madonna by Lucio Fontana

every rough edge left,

every vibrant corner bespeaks uneasiness,

so variable and real

that it's impossible to capture in its completeness.

As with his famous slashed canvases,

Fontana pursues a new dimension of space.

And in meditating on the frenetic truth of his age,

tries to find the meaning of life.

In the words of Salvador Dali,

heaven is to be found neither high nor low,

neither on the right nor on the left.

Heaven is found exactly at the center of the man who has faith.

Now I still don't have faith,

and I'm afraid to die without heaven.

Salvador Dali, too, was searching for another dimension of the mystic,

and he did so by digging deep within himself.

Anticlerical, like all the surrealists,

late in life the artist looked for a mediation point,

as demonstrated by the crucifixion

displayed in the Vatican museums.

This faceless Christ without a cross

has a healthy young body imbued with a soft divine light

that seems to slowly approach the viewer

so as to envelop him.

All is immersed in a sort of desolate paradise lost,

adrift in a disquieting eternity

that well represents Dali's personal conflict,

torn between provocation

and an inner search for the absolute.

The Vatican museums are a labyrinth

to be gone through in the same way we do when examining our inner self.

Every work in the museums,

even the most apparently remote,

has a powerful bond with the others.

But what if the torment or personal message of an artist

becomes so great that it is comprehensible

to completely different peoples and cultures?

What happens when art becomes truly universal?

The Vatican museums are like a mirror

that reflects the history and the destiny of humankind.

That is how the pope wanted them.

One day in the year 1508 here in Rome,

a great pope, Julius II,

summoned two men to appear before him.

One was a 25-year-old,

Raffaello Sanzio d'Albino,

or Raphael,

whom he asked to paint his private suite.

What today we know as the world's most famous rooms,

the Raphael rooms.

The other man was 33 years of age,

a Florentine named Michelangelo Buonarroti,

to whom he said,

you shall paint the vault of the Sistine Chapel for me.

The great history of universal art

begins with this pope and with these great artists.

And it dates from the year 1508.

Raised in Urbino in the refined studio of his father,

already as a boy, Raffaello Sanzio

was familiar with the painting of Leonardo and Michelangelo

and looked for a point of mediation between the two.

Summoned to Rome to assist established masters,

Raphael surprised everyone right from the first fresco

of the Stanza della Signatura,

the work that was to change his fate forever.

The disputation of the Holy Sacrament

is so grand as to cancel the work of all the others.

It is the triumph of the Eucharist,

the divine word that shows itself to the world.

According to Vasari, the work has no equal.

Julius II dismissed the other painters

and assigned the entire fresco cycle to Raphael,

understanding that his art was ideal

for telling old truths in a new way.

Raphael wanted to outdo himself

and meditated on the future of his art

as expression of a prayer

understandable throughout the world.

Thus, some of his greatest masterpieces were born.

Voices of the past resound with new force

in the Stanza della Signatura.

This is the School of Athens.

All the wisdom of the world is represented here,

which is the reason why it is called the School of Athens,

as if all schools of human thought

were gathered around Aristotle and Plato.

The supreme philosophers.

Raphael glorifies his contemporaries

in the bodies of the ancients,

creating a sort of personal affective family tree.

And so we can recognize his beloved Leonardo da Vinci

portraying Plato,

while the mathematician Euclid

is Donato Bramante, Raphael's mentor.

Raphael himself peers out from behind his teacher, Perugino,

creating an instant rapport with the onlooker.

A last-minute addition

in the guise of the restless Heraclitus

is the dark face of Michelangelo Buonalotti

in a supreme tribute by Raphael to his much-applied rival.

And the enthusiasm for the novelty of Michelangelo's approach

takes shape in another of the room's masterpieces,

the Incendio di Borgo.

Echoes of the Aeneid resound among the classical architecture

never so theatrical and dramatic.

But the lead role is played by the bodies,

twisting bodies, despairing over their fate,

dominate the space,

and draw our gaze towards the Pope in the background,

who extinguishes the flames by making the sign of the cross.

In exploring the Raphael rooms at the Vatican Museums,

among other things one can come across the first nocturnal scene

in the history of art.

It is the liberation of St. Peter,

where God's miracle is performed once more on the Church of Rome

with the coming of the Angel of Salvation.

Feodor Dostoevsky said that divine things issued from Raphael's hands

and divine are the rays of light radiated by the angel,

which defeat the rigid black prison bars,

setting the scene in the delicate atmosphere of a dream.

This is a dream that,

thanks also to the silver aura of the moon,

is narrated by the one true element,

the light that seems to come directly from paradise.

The true philosophy,

the divine religion,

the law that governs the actions and life of human beings

and the beauty that consoles the soul of everyone.

We can experience this by entering Raphael's rooms,

willed by a pope who had understood everything.

Julius II della Rovere,

a pope who managed to choose in a single stroke

the ablest of all.

One is Raphael,

the other is no less the Michelangelo.

To discover himself in the eyes of the other,

at once identical and different.

Brothers and rivals,

opposite reflections of the same image.

Different in terms of style and temperament,

Raphael and Michelangelo continued to work

on increasingly more ambitious works,

each determined to outdo the other.

When, in 1509,

Pope Julius II proposed that the fresco

the vault of the Sistine Chapel,

Michelangelo accepted.

Because even if he considered painting to be an art inferior to sculpture,

it was the challenge that he'd always been seeking.

Michelangelo tackled the undertaking and did it all by himself

in a sort of hand-to-hand combat.

A duel against the 1080 square meters of the Sistine Chapel

to be filled with figures,

more than 300 of them.

He worked here for four years until 1512,

a brutal task.

Just think what it meant to work all alone

on a scaffolding 20 meters high

in the cold of winter and the heat of summer,

with the colors that had dripped down on his face

being mixed with the sweat and the dust.

Covering the vault of the Sistine Chapel with frescoes

was an auroric exploit.

In the Sistine Chapel,

there is all the love, provocation, and obsession of a man

with a desire to make a life

pour out from a bare, unsafe ceiling.

Michelangelo had to cope with myriad hardships and difficulties,

ranging from the constant and frequently harsh interference of the Pope

to the mold that devoured his frescoes.

As was the case with the flood,

which became detached upon completion.

Michelangelo had to paint it all over again,

with nothing more to aid him than the strength of desperation.

But in the end, Michelangelo won.

And when it was opened to the public in 1512,

the Sistine Chapel dumbfounded the whole world.

Michelangelo had taken his inspiration from the events of Genesis,

clashing with Julius II,

who would have preferred classic portrayals of the apostles.

Instead, such events served the real protagonist of the work, the body.

Mythological, gigantic, absolute.

Not surprisingly,

Pope John Paul II described the Sistine Chapel

as the sanctuary of the theology of the human body.

The body, painted as a flawless sculpture,

as the matrix of the divine,

which passes through the ancient inspiration

found in the Belvedere Torso and in the Lercum,

where it all began.

As is evident in the audacious interpretation of the creation of Eve,

just as the church was born from the blood of Christ,

so woman is born directly from Adam's rib,

bringing with her the same masculinity and manly appearance.

In the temptation and expulsion from paradise,

Eve's guilt is harshly highlighted by the horror in her features.

While the serpent, which also has a female body,

appears to be reflected by the angel that drives out Adam and Eve,

the composition is at once powerful and disquiet.

Everything happens before the eyes of the Hebrew prophets and pagan symbols,

the great sages who from the abbesses of time

announced the coming of the Messiah.

But the most extraordinary fresco of the entire vault

is the creation of Adam.

The idea is primitive and yet extremely powerful,

the spark of life that is about to be passed on

from the finger of God to that of Adam.

It is as if God were looking for himself in Adam,

mirror of his youth,

each hand outstretched towards the other

without ever really being able to touch.

It is as if Michelangelo was searching

for the whole reason of his art in that infinitesimal space

separating the two index fingers.

The vault of the Sistine Chapel was an absolute triumph,

but Michelangelo came out of it a broken man,

his back bent, his eyesight dimmed forever.

And yet,

his fate was destined to be linked once again

with that of the Sistine Chapel

over 30 years later.

Without having seen the Systine Chapel it is impossible to form a worthy idea

of what a man is able to achieve. - Johann Wolfgang Goethe -

Despite their fierce rivalry,

Raphael was one of the first to acclaim

the sealing of the Sistine Chapel.

For him,

Michelangelo's pathos marked a new starting point,

and at the same time, a testament.

The Transfiguration is Raphael's last painting,

and also his greatest masterpiece.

This work of crystalline beauty

seems painted with the very essence of emotion.

In the upper portion, Christ ascends heavenward,

looking beyond the limits imposed by the composition,

indicating where the prayers,

the looks and the hearts of the faithful

must turn to.

Below him is chaos,

amazement, the tangle of bodies

that culminates in the healing of the young man possessed.

So, unexpected and powerful

as to take one's breath away.

Here there is love for ancient philosophy,

there is admiration for Michelangelo

and the desire to distinguish himself from his rival,

and a profound sense of theology

in the white light radiated by Christ,

expressed better than in a thousand words.

There are figures that were to become exemplary

for the history of art.

They would be mentioned by Ingres,

by David, by Poisson,

because it really can be said

that Raphael taught the world.

No artist up to Picasso

failed to come to study, to copy, and to understand.

Painted at the end of his days,

when he was bedridden

and wasting away from a premature disease,

there is all of Raphael in the transfiguration,

and the idea that art ought to be transformed

into a sublime prayer to God.

Here lies Rafael, in real Life nature feared to be outdone by him.

Now that he is dead, it fears to die.

-Epitaph of Raphael's tomb in the Pantheen-

Meanwhile, Michelangelo, deprived of his historic rival,

was sinking deeper into his solitary, obsessive search for perfection.

Michelangelo worked under two great Popes.

One was Julius II, with whom he offered quarrel.

The other was Paul III of the Farnese family.

It was Paul III who commissioned Michelangelo

to decorate the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.

By this time Michelangelo was old

by the standards of the day,

being in his sixties.

Nevertheless, he agreed to take on the work.

The job of painting 600 square meters

was completed in the month of October of 1541.

In the book of Revelation, St. John wrote,

And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal,

there was silence in heaven

about the space of half an hour.

And I saw the seven angels

which stood before God,

and to them were given

seven troubles.

In those years the world was shaken

by the religious storm involving the Lutherans,

which with worrisome ease was calling into question

the basic tenets of Catholicism.

Restless as always,

Michelangelo became fascinated

by the theories of a group of reformists

that was looking for a drastic point of agreement

between the Roman Catholics and Lutherans,

the spirituality or spiritual men.

These theories gave new lymph to his inspiration,

almost becoming the reason that made it seem worthwhile for him

to face single-handedly the enormous creative and physical effort required

to produce The Last Judgment.

This shockingly revolutionary work

was different from anything ever seen before.

Michelangelo repudiated past art

and distanced himself from the perfect perspective of the ceiling.

Everything in The Last Judgment is sheer strength.

The lapis lazuli blue background becomes incandescent lava

where the bodies of terrorized souls float heavily,

while on their naked backs

even the angels' wings have been destroyed.

All is waiting, hope and fear,

and no one is spared Christ's dreadful gesture

which prompts even the Virgin Mary to withdraw.

The Day of Judgment has come

and never was it so real.

After 500 years of criticism, praise and incomprehension,

The Last Judgment remains

the deeply personal act of faith of a truly unique artist.

And at the same time,

a point of no return for the history of art.

The journey of mankind in search of divine perfection

down through the centuries.

Tormented,

thrilling

and without end.

Believing the masterpieces of the Vatican museums,

we sense what drove great artists

to make themselves an instrument of God.

And at the same time, our truest part is revealed to us.

The fascinating thing about the Vatican museums

is that one must visit them at a leisurely pace.

Go at your own pace

and you'll have the impression of entering something

marvelous and fascinating history

and the destiny of mankind.

And this is the reason why the museums are steadily growing

and why the collections are becoming richer.

A museum is a living creature.

It is like a plant, like a tree

that grows and changes over the years.

The Vatican Museums are all of this.

Art is testimony of the spiritual aspirations of man

and of the quest for the supreme beauty

that finds its origin and its fulfilment in God.

The Vatican Museums were founded by Pope Julius ll in 1506

and opened to the public in 1771 at the desire of Pope Clement XIV.

Each year more than 5 million people admire the masterpieces exhibited

in the 7 kilometres rooms and corridors of The Vatican Museums.

lt is the world's sixth most-visited museum.

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