Vatican Museums
Nucleus of the Vatican Museums was the collection of statues made by Pope Julius II and displayed in the "Courtyard of Statues", today the Octagonal Courtyard. In their form of art collections arranged in special buildings accessible to the public, the Museums and Papal Galleries originated by Clement XIV and Pius VI, and therefore took initially the name of Museo Pio-Clementino. Pius VII will greatly expanded, adding the Chiaramonti Museum, the New Wing and the Lapidary Gallery. Gregory XVI founded the Etruscan Museum (1837) with the relics found in excavations in southern Etruria from 1828 onward, the Egyptian Museum (1839) with the Egyptian monuments from explorations in Egypt, together with those who were scattered in museums of art classical and also in the Capitoline Museum, the Lateran Profane Museum (1844), with statues, bas-reliefs, mosaics from the Roman period, which could not take place in the Vatican Palace.
At the Lateran Profane Museum, Pio IX said in 1854 the Christian Museum, comprising sculptures, especially sarcophagi and ancient Christian inscriptions, and later (1856-1869) features two rooms of monuments from the excavations of Ostia performed in S. Herculaneum and St. Aurea. Under the pontificate of Pius X, in 1910, adding a section that contains 137 inscriptions of ancient Jewish cemeteries of Rome, in much of the cemetery on the way Portuense and donated by the fund, Marquis Pellegrini Quarantotti. These two collections have been transported, under Pope John XXIII, the Lateran Palace to a new building specially erected in the Vatican, and in 1970 was reopened to the public, under the name Museum Gregorian Profane Museum, Pio Christian. Museums are also part of the Gallery of Tapestries, a collection of tapestries from different factories of the century. XVI and XVII, the Gallery of Maps, instituted by Gregory XIII and restored by Urban VIII, the halls of the Immaculate Conception and Sobieski the Stanze and the Loggia of Raphael, which were decorated by Pope Julius II and Leo X, the Chapel of the Blessed Angelico , painted under the pontificate of Nicholas V, the Sistine Chapel, so called from its founder, Pope Sixtus IV, the Borgia Apartment, former home of Alexander VI, restored and opened to the public by Leo XIII in 1897, the Vatican Picture Gallery, located under Pius VII in the apartment Borgia, later Pope Gregory XIII in that of the third Loggia, transported by St. Pius X in 1909 in the gallery below, the arm of the Library of the gardens, and placed by Pius XI in 1932 in a special building near the new entrance of the Museums and the Missionary-Ethnological Museum was founded by Pius XI in 1926, arranged on the upper floors of the Lateran Palace, and later transferred, under Pope John XXIII at the Vatican, where it was reopened to the public in the same building that houses the collections former Lateran. In 1973 it was added to the Collection of Modern Religious Art, inaugurated by Paul VI on June 23 of that year. The Historical Museum, founded also in 1973, transferred in 1987 in the papal palace of the Lateran, a collection of iconographic Popes, as well as relics of the Pontifical Military Corps and the Family and the Pontifical Chapel, also abolished the office hours, and finally , a record of the ceremony is no longer in use.