Vatican Art Gallery

The Pinacoteca Vaticana—the Vatican Art Gallery in Italian—was founded on 27 October 1932 and belongs to the Vatican Museums. That date matters, because this is one of the newer museum spaces in the papal complex, created to give the painting collection a proper home rather than leaving it scattered through the museums. You also hear it called the Vatikanische Pinakothek in German, which reflects how international the Vatican’s collections have always been. Inside, the gallery focuses on painting rather than sculpture or archaeology, so it gives you a different angle on the papal collections than the grand corridors and chapels nearby. The most famous painted gallery in the Vatican Museums is the Galleria delle carte geografiche, commissioned in 1580 by Pope Gregory XIII and completed over three years, from 1580 to 1583, by Ignazio Danti. …

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