The papal picture gallery

The Vatican Museum's Pinacoteca is the best painting gallery in all of Rome

Caravaggio's Deposition in the Vatican Museums' Pinacoteca.

One of the top painting galleries in Rome has so many masterpieces they nearly crowd one another out on the walls in room after room of Old Master genius.

I'm serious; in the artistic overload of going from Giotto to Da Vinci to Caravaggio to Raphael, you end up merely skimming over works by Pietro Lorenzetti, Fra' Angelico, Titian, Pinturricchio, and Bellini, any one of which would be the prize of a lesser collection.

Among the major masterpieces are Giotto's Stefaneschi Triptych (1320), a Perugino Madonna and Child with Saints (1496), Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished St. Jerome (1482), Guido Reni's Crucifixion of St. Peter (1605), and Caravaggio's Deposition from the Cross (1604).

Paintings by Simone Martini, Benozzo Gozzoli, Filippo Lippi, Melozzo da Forlì, Veronese, and Il Guercino round out the A-list of top Renaissance and baroque artists represented here.

The Vatican Museums
Pinacoteca (Painting Gallery)
Rapahel Rooms
Sistine Chapel
Pio-Clementine Museum
Modern Religious Art
Chiaramonti/New Wing
Gregorian Egyptian Museum
Gregorian Etruscan Museum
Gregorian Profane Museum
Pio Christian Museum
Missionary-Ethnological Museum
Vatican Gardens

But the most famous name here has go to be Raphael, the subject of the Pinacoteca's Room VIII, where you'll find his Coronation of the Virgin (1503) and Madonna of Foligno (1511) surrounded by the Flemish-woven tapestries executed to the master's designs.

All that is just set decoration around the main act. In the center of the room hangs the young Renaissance master's greatest masterpiece, Raphael's Transfiguration (1520). This 13.5-foot-high study in color and light was discovered almost finished in the artist's studio when he died suddenly at the age of 37, and mourners carried it through the streets of Rome during his funeral procession.