The Chiaramonti Museum and Braccio Nuovo, sculpture as Canova arranged it

The Chiaramonti Museum and the Braccio Nuovo are the ancient sculpture most visitors miss without noticing. They’re on the first floor, not far from the Pio Clementino, and the crowd tends to bypass them on the way to the upper galleries. For me they’re one of the best surprises in the whole complex, the Braccio Nuovo above all, and they tell a story no other room tells quite as well, of how the Vatican rebuilt itself after Napoleon walked off with its finest pieces. Here’s what to see in both and how to fit them into my route through the Vatican Museums.

A museum born out of looting

The 1797 Treaty of Tolentino forced the Papal States to surrender the masterpieces of the Pio Clementino Museum to Napoleon’s France. Pius VII didn’t wait to get them back. From 1806 he bought from Roman dealers and from the excavators working across the Papal States, and used the haul to fill a new museum in the loggia linking the Belvedere Palazzetto to the rest of the palaces. It carries his surname, Chiaramonti.

The man who decided how it all went together was Antonio Canova. He wanted to unite what he called the three sister arts, with sculpture in the ancient pieces, architecture in brackets made from old cornices and painting in frescoes by young artists that he paid for himself. The return of the looted works, after the Congress of Vienna, gets its own lunette on wall XXI.

What should you look for in the Chiaramonti?

There are around a thousand sculptures, including one of the largest collections of Roman portraits anywhere, so it pays to know what you’re after. The display doesn’t isolate the masterpieces; it sets them among lesser pieces so you can compare, an idea taken from Quatremère de Quincy. It’s a fine principle and an exhausting one if you try to take everything in.

I’d look for two pieces. Hercules with the infant Telephus was found near Campo de’ Fiori and was already in Julius II’s Statue Court, making it one of the first things the popes ever collected. The other is Gradiva, a relief of girls walking. Its name comes from a 1903 novel by Wilhelm Jensen; Jung recommended the book to Freud, Freud wrote an essay on it in 1906 and bought a cast in Rome that hung in his study beside the famous couch. I rate that chain of events among the best anecdotes in the museums.

The Braccio Nuovo, a hall built to make statues feel at home

Once the works came back, more space was needed. Pius VII commissioned the Roman architect Raffaele Stern to build a new wing for the Chiaramonti, and after Stern’s death in 1820 Pasquale Belli completed it. It opened in February 1822, with a commission chaired by Canova overseeing the display. The museums describe it as one of the most significant examples of neoclassical architecture in Rome, and I’d agree.

It’s a 68-metre gallery under a coffered vault with skylights, clad in coloured marble taken from Roman buildings, with ancient mosaics set into the floor between large slabs and stucco friezes modelled on classical reliefs. Halfway along it opens into an apse on one side and, on the other, onto steps leading to a portico over the Courtyard of the Pine Cone. Its 28 niches hold larger-than-life statues.

Augustus, the Nile and a pair of peacocks

Augustus of Prima Porta is the reason to come. He was found at the villa of his wife Livia and dates from the early 1st century. He’s addressing his troops in armour and cloak, and the politics are on the breastplate, where the Parthian king returns the standards Rome lost at Carrhae in 53 BC, with the Sky above and the Earth below. The pose borrows from Polykleitos’s Doryphoros, and there’s a copy in the same hall so you can compare.

The Nile is the other star, a reclining old man with a cornucopia and a sphinx, climbed over by sixteen children, one for each cubit the river rose. And don’t miss the two gilded bronze peacocks. Early medieval sources place them by Hadrian’s Mausoleum, now Castel Sant’Angelo, and for centuries they decorated the Pine Cone fountain outside the old basilica.

When to fit them in

I’d see them early, while you’re still on the first floor, because the route then climbs to the galleries and doesn’t come back. I’d give them about twenty minutes. If 27 November 2026 suits you, the Musica ai Musei series finishes here at 18:00 on a standard ticket, which I cover in the Vatican Museums at night.