James Tucker in Cov

On day two in Rome, we headed out to the Vatican, with the plan of getting there nice and early (around 8 AM) and thus being at the head of the line when the doors opened between 9-30 and 10. It basically worked, and despite there being apparently between 15-20,000 people in the museums that day, it only occassionally felt massively busy and that was always due to the dreaded tour groups.
The Vatican museums are basically two parts- the old papal palaces, which contain rooms decorated by Fra Angelico, Raphael, and of course Michaelangelo, and the two huge galleries (they must have been nearly a kilometre long each) which house the various collections of art (Early Christian, Egyptian, Profane/Classical etc). We did the apartments first, and were routed through about thirty different rooms on our way to the Sistine Chapel, which we were always promised was just around the corner. Tour groups got to cut straight to the photo-ops, but we'd be in a collection of 20th Century religious painting, open the door marked "Sistine Chapel" and then end up on a roof somewhere. In the end, this was pretty good, as we got to see some things I never would have known were there, such as Raphael's frescoes (top).
The Gregorian Museum of Profane Sculpture was closed, which really disappointed me, because I wanted to see some of the famous Greek sculptures I knew were there, such as the Laocoon group, which was pulled out of the ruins of Nero's Golden House in the Renaissance. The palace had been untouched for 1500 years, and when it was finally explored, artists like Michaelangelo were faced with ancient sculptures every bit as good as their own. Instead of seeing those, I did get to see things like a 20-foot wide red marble bowl, apparently from Nero's rotating dining room.
On the long and winding way out, we saw papal artifacts such as the holy hammer and trowel used for putting up and taking down that wall in the north door of St. Peter's (only open for jubilee years) and then stumbled onto a courtyard full of old greek and roman statues. Most of the realyl famous stuff like the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon group were there. The fact that western civilisation basically forgot how to make art like this for a thousand years kept weighing on my mind, as did the fact that it was only rediscovered at a time when people were finally catching up to what the Romans had been able to manage.