The Vatican Pinacoteca, with Raphael, Leonardo and Caravaggio in three rooms

The Pinacoteca is the part of the Vatican Museums people skip most often, and I can see why, since it’s in a separate building and the tide of visitors pulls towards the Sistine. But to my mind it’s the best way to start. In a little over half an hour you see Raphael’s last painting, an unfinished Leonardo and one of the great Caravaggios, all before the museums fill up. Here’s what it is, what’s in each room and how I’d go round it. Everything else is gathered in my walk through the Vatican Museums.

A picture gallery that arrived late

It sounds odd, but the popes were collecting sculpture long before they had a proper home for their paintings. Around 1790 Pius VI put together a first collection of just 118 pictures, and it didn’t last. In 1797, under the Treaty of Tolentino, several masterpieces left for Paris, and the idea of a gallery open to the public only took shape in 1817, after Napoleon’s fall, as the works came back. Even then the pictures kept being moved from room to room inside the Apostolic Palaces, with no home worthy of them.

Pius XI solved it. He commissioned Luca Beltrami to design a building in part of the Giardino Quadrato, standing alone among paths and chosen for its light, and opened it on 27 October 1932, next to the museums’ new entrance. That’s the same year usually given for the double spiral staircase that half the world mistakes for the Bramante Staircase. Today it holds around 460 paintings in 18 rooms, arranged by period and school, from the Primitives of the 12th and 13th centuries to the 19th.

Room VIII, or Raphael from start to finish

If I could only walk into one room in the whole building, it would be this one. It holds three Raphaels that, taken in order, read like a biography. The Coronation of the Virgin, from 1502-1504, is so youthful that the museums describe it as his work closest to Perugino, his master. The Madonna of Foligno, from 1511-1512, was painted while he was decorating the Room of Heliodorus, as a thank-offering from Sigismondo de’ Conti for his house in Foligno, spared by the lightning you can see in the landscape behind.

Then comes the Transfiguration, 1516-1520, more than four metres tall. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici commissioned it for Narbonne Cathedral, but Raphael died in 1520 and the cardinal kept it, later giving it to San Pietro in Montorio. Above, Christ in glory between Moses and Elijah; below, the apostles faced with the possessed boy. It’s his final painting, and Vasari called it the most celebrated, the most beautiful and the most divine. After seeing it, the Raphael Rooms look quite different.

Is the unfinished Leonardo worth it?

Very much so, and precisely because it’s unfinished. The Saint Jerome in room IX, from around 1482, is still at the sketch stage, with some areas nearly complete and others barely drawn in, so you can see how Leonardo built up a figure. The painting’s history sounds made up, but it’s on the official page. Cardinal Joseph Fesch, Napoleon’s uncle, found it by chance, and tradition says it was in two halves. In fact the panel is cut into five pieces. Pius IX bought it in 1856.

Caravaggio, Giotto and Melozzo

Room XII has Caravaggio’s Deposition, painted around 1600-1604 for Santa Maria in Vallicella. Look at what it actually shows, because it isn’t a burial. Nicodemus and John lower Christ onto the Stone of Unction, the slab that will seal the tomb, while Mary of Clopas raises her arms to heaven. It too went to Paris in 1797 and came back in 1816.

If you’ve time to spare, I’d go back to the beginning. Room II has the Stefaneschi Triptych by Giotto and his workshop, from around 1315-1320, painted on both sides for the old St Peter’s Basilica, one face for the priest and one for the congregation. Room IV has Melozzo da Forlì’s music-making angels, fragments of an apse from around 1480 destroyed in 1711. And elsewhere in the gallery is something I’m very fond of, the clay-and-straw models Bernini used to cast the bronze figures of the Chair of St Peter.

My plan for the Pinacoteca

The official guided tours start here and move on to the Pio Clementino Museum, and I’d do the same on the 08:00 slot. I’d give it about 35 minutes, going straight to rooms VIII, IX and XII, and only stop for Giotto and Melozzo if I had energy to spare. Walking all 18 rooms on a first visit is the surest way to reach the Sistine exhausted.

It’s on the standard ticket, with nothing extra to pay, and personal photos without flash are allowed. By the exit of the Carriage Pavilion, the Le Carrozze café looks out over the Pinacoteca, in case you need a coffee before carrying on.