The Pio Clementino Museum, where the Vatican Museums began

The Pio Clementino is the part of the Vatican Museums that most people walk straight through, and I think that’s the costliest mistake of the whole visit. There are no famous frescoes or ceilings to photograph here, just marble, and marble asks you to stop. Yet this is exactly where it all started, and it holds the sculpture I’d put above any other in the Vatican. Here’s what it is, which pieces to look for and how long I’d give it. If you haven’t settled on an order for your visit yet, start with what to see in the Vatican Museums in three hours.

A courtyard of statues that turned into a museum

The papal collections of classical sculpture began in Julius II’s Courtyard of the Statues, known today as the Octagonal Court. In the second half of the 18th century they grew through excavations in Rome and Lazio and purchases from collectors and dealers, and under the influence of the Enlightenment they became something new for the time, a public museum designed to protect and study ancient art. Clement XIV and Pius VI founded it, and their names give us Pio Clementino.

The rooms were created by adapting and extending the Palazzetto del Belvedere of Innocent VIII, with neoclassical architecture by Alessandro Dori, Michelangelo Simonetti and Giuseppe Camporese. Then came the blow. In 1797, under the Treaty of Tolentino, the Papal States had to hand the finest pieces to Napoleon’s France, and off they went to Paris. After 1815 nearly all of them came home, and it was Canova who negotiated their return. So when you stand in front of them, remember they’ve been on quite a journey.

The Laocoön, the sculpture I’d never miss

Laocoön was a Trojan priest of Apollo who argued against letting the wooden horse into Troy. Athena and Poseidon, who were on the Greeks’ side, sent two monstrous serpents from the sea that seized him and his two sons. The official page adds a reading I love, because in Roman eyes those innocent deaths allow Aeneas to escape and, in time, to found Rome.

The group came to light on the Esquiline in 1506 and was at once identified with the Laocoön that Pliny describes as the masterpiece of Agesander, Athenodorus and Polydorus of Rhodes. Julius II wasn’t going to let it get away and made it the heart of his courtyard. Its date has been argued over at length, and the one that now prevails is around 40-30 BC. My advice is to walk round it. Head-on you see the father’s cry, but from the side you understand what’s happening to the sons.

Why does the Apollo Belvedere have a new hand?

A few steps away stands the Apollo, found in 1489 in the ruins of a house on the Viminal and bought by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, the future Julius II, who moved it to the Belvedere, where it’s recorded from 1508. What you see is Roman marble, carved in the early decades of the 2nd century AD after a Greek bronze original dated to about 330 BC and probably by Leochares. Montorsoli restored it in 1532 and 1533, completing the left arm.

The recent chapter is the one I enjoy most. In December 2019 serious structural problems came to light, and the fix was a carbon-fibre support at the back anchored to the base, an idea Canova had already used when the statue came back from Paris in 1816. The restorers also swapped Montorsoli’s left hand for a cast of the Baia hand, a fragment of a Roman plaster copy taken from the Greek original. While the Apollo was away in France, Pius VII put Canova’s Perseus on its pedestal, a statue modelled on the Apollo that’s still in the courtyard.

The Torso, and rooms that feel like a palace

In the Room of the Muses you’ll find the Belvedere Torso, a marble body with no head, arms or legs, known in Rome since the 15th century and added to the collections between 1530 and 1536. The leading theory is that it shows Ajax contemplating suicide, and it bears the signature of Apollonios of Athens. The room opened in 1784 for statues found at a villa near Tivoli, and there’s a nice twist, since some of them weren’t muses at all and 18th-century restorers altered them to make up the nine.

The Round Room is something else again, a dome modelled on the Pantheon and finished in 1779, with ancient mosaics from Otricoli and Sacrofano on the floor and a red porphyry basin that reaches 13 metres in circumference. In the Greek Cross Room, the old entrance hall with «Museum Pium» over the door, two porphyry sarcophagi dominate. And in the Room of the Animals, Pius VI set up a stone zoo that I’d call the best stop of all if you’re with children.

How I’d go round it

The official tours come here after the Vatican Pinacoteca, and I’d do the same. I’d give it about forty minutes, ten for the Laocoön, five for the Apollo, five for the Torso and the rest for the rooms. On the way out, the Gallery of the Candelabra, which the official site groups with this museum, leads you straight to the Gallery of Maps.

One room sits outside the normal visit, the Cabinet of the Masks with its mosaics from Hadrian’s Villa, which only opens under the same paid scheme as the Bramante Staircase. Everything else is on the standard ticket, and here you can take photos as long as you leave the flash off.