The Apostolic Palace Other News
A virtual tour of the Vatican (Part 1)
Oct 01, 2007 14:53:32
 |  | As early as the mid 9th century a small, fortified city surrounded the area around the ancient St Peter’s Basilica, enircled by walls built by Leo IV (847-855), the so-called “Leonine city”. Between the end of the 13th and the first decades of the 14th century, some edifices were built around the square courtyard, known as “Pappagallo”. They were the first Vatican palaces.
 After the Avignon Schism (1309-1377), no new buildings were erected until the end of the 15th century, when the palaces of Sixtus IV (1471-1484) were built. These include the Sistine Chapel, which takes its name from the Pope. Innocent VIII (1484-1492) also built some palaces, about 300 metres north of the Vatican basilica. Julius II (1503-1513) and his architect, Donato Bramante, had the idea of joining the two groups of buildings constructed by his predecessors, adding two magnificent, three-level courtyards. During the 16th and 17th centuries, popes continued to work on and enlarge the Vatican palaces. Sixtus V (1585- 1590) also built the palace where the present pope lives and where every Sunday at noon he stands at the window (the second from the right on the third floor), and blesses the crowd that gathers in the magnificent Vatican square.
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| | Papal Apartment - Top floor of the Apostolic Palace
| The old papal telephone shown above has been replaced with a white phone.
|  The Papal Apartments are a collection of rooms, both private and state, located on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace, which have served since the 17th century as the religious residence of the Pope as pontiff of the Catholic Church. Prior to 1870, the Pope's official secular residence as sovereign of the Papal States was the Quirinal Palace, now the official residence of the president of Italy.
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| |  | | The Papal Apartments have seven large rooms plus a private chapel, medical suite, an office for the Papal Secretary, a roof garden and staff quarters for the nuns who run the Papal Household. It is from the window loggia of the apartment's study that the pope greets pilgrims to St Peter's Square. | |  | The Borgia Apartment was adapted for personal use by Pope Alexander VI (Rodrígo de Borgia). In the late 15th century, he commissioned the Italian painter Pinturicchio and his studio to decorate them with frescos. The paintings, which were executed between 1492 and 1494, drew on a complex iconographic program that used themes from medieval encyclopedias, adding an eschatological layer of meaning and celebrating the supposedly divine origins of the Borgias. The rooms are: Room of the Sibyls, Room of the Creed, Room of the Liberal Arts, Room of the Saints, Room of the Faith. However, because the rooms were closely associated with the disgraced Borgia family, they were abandoned in 1503 after the death of Pope Alexander VI. In 1889 Pope Leo XIII had the rooms restored and opened for public viewing.
|  | The four Stanze di Raffaello ("Raphael's rooms") in the Palace of the Vatican form a suite of reception rooms, the public part of the papal apartments. They are famous for their frescoes, painted by Raphael and his workshop. Together with Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, these are the grand fresco sequences that mark the High Renaissance in Rome.  The Stanze, as they are invariably called, were originally intended as a suite of apartments for Pope Julius II. He commissioned Raphael, at the time a relatively young artist from Urbino, and his studio in 1508 or 1509 to redecorate the existing interiors of the rooms entirely. It was possibly Julius' intent to outshine the apartments of his predecessor (and rival) Pope Alexander VI, as the Stanze are directly above Alexander's Borgia Apartment. They are on the third floor, overlooking the south side of the Belvedere Courtyard.
Running from east to west, as a visitor would have entered the apartment, but not following the sequence in which the stanze were frescoed, the rooms are the Sala di Costantino ("Hall of Constantine"), the Stanza di Eliodoro ("Room of Heliodorus"), the Stanza della Segnatura ("Room of the Signatura") and the Stanza dell'incendio del Borgo ("The Room of the Fire in the Borgo"). After the death of Julius in 1513, with two rooms frescoed, Pope Leo X continued the program. Following Raphael's death in 1520, his assistants Gianfrancesco Penni, Giulio Romano and Raffaellino del Colle finished the project with the frescoes in the Sala di Costantino. |
|  | | The Sistine Chapel (Italian: Cappella Sistina) is a chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope, in the Vatican City. Its fame rests on its architecture, which evokes Solomon's Temple of the Old Testament, its decoration, frescoed throughout by the greatest Renaissance artists, including Michelangelo whose ceiling is legendary, and its purpose, as a site of papal religious and functionary activity, notably the conclave, at which a new Pope is selected. |
| Visit my other Vatican Sites
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