Rippling Roman Muscles

The Vatican's Pio-Clemntino Museum is one of Rome's best collections of ancient Greek and Roman statues

The Laocoön group in the Vatican Museums. (Photo by Jastrow)

This is the best of the Vatican's several ancient Greek and Roman sculpture collections.

In the octagonal Belvedere Courtyard—the original core of the Vatican museums—you'll find the famed Laocoön group, a 1st-century BC tangle of a man and his two children losing a struggle with giant snakes (their fate for warning the Trojans about the Greeks’ tricky wooden horse).

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

Nearby is the Apollo Belvedere, an ancient Roman copy of a 4th-century BC Greek original that for centuries continued to define the ideal male body. As late as the baroque era, a young Bernini was basing his own Apollo in the Borghese Gallery on this one.

In the long Room of the Muses you'll find the muscular Belvedere Torso, a 1st-century BC fragment of another Hercules statue that Renaissance artists like Michelangelo studied to learn how the ancients captured so well the human physique.

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