Vatican Museums

Inside the Apostolic Palace, galleries connect with former living quarters, chapels, and halls built for different collections. The route therefore passes through a whole chain of rooms, where the collections of several popes stand side by side. The Octagonal Courtyard was formerly called the Courtyard of the Statues. The marble group Laocoön and His Sons still stands there, and the snakes coiled around the figures are immediately visible.

In the summer of fifteen oh six, Pope Julius II ordered a marble group installed in the inner Cortile del Belvedere: a man and two youths being strangled by snakes. Julius collected ancient statues at his Vatican residence. With them, he wanted to present Christian Rome as the heir to the Rome of the emperors. The garden was intended for the pope, his guests, and artists admitted there. A public museum did not yet exist.

A few months earlier, Felice de Fredis, owner of a vineyard on Rome's Oppian Hill, was preparing the site for the construction of a house. Workers came upon fragments of a large sculpture underground. Julius sent the papal architect Giuliano da Sangallo to identify the find. Sangallo compared it with an ancient description of the celebrated group Laocoön and His Sons. That was how the sculpture was identified at the time.

According to ancient legend, the Trojan priest Laocoön tried to persuade his fellow citizens not to bring into the city the wooden horse left by the Greeks. The gods who aided the Greeks sent snakes that killed the priest together with his sons. The marble preserves the moment when the father is still resisting, one son is already almost exhausted, and the other is trying to break free.

De Fredis handed the find over to Julius. In exchange, he received the right to collect for life a portion of the duty on goods brought into Rome through Porta San Giovanni. Thus, the marble discovered on the site became an annual income for the vineyard owner. Julius acquired the work and made it the center of his Courtyard of the Statues. Other antiquities were placed around Laocoön, and this private papal garden became the first core of the future Vatican Museums.

Two and a half centuries later, Pope Clement XIV decided to keep in Rome ancient works that owners were selling to foreign buyers, and he turned the papal collection into a public museum. His successor, Pius VI, expanded the exhibition spaces and the collection. Their names remain in the name of the Pio-Clementino Museum.

That is why the Vatican Museums consist of many connected parts: collections of different popes, specially built halls, galleries, former living quarters, and chapels of the Apostolic Palace. Laocoön still stands in the Octagonal Courtyard—the former Courtyard of the Statues, where Julius II ordered it moved from Felice de Fredis's vineyard.