Apostolic Palace site features

From outside, the palace reads as a cliff of windows above a colonnade, and you never see it whole. It is approached, queued for and entered as part of something else — the museum route — so the building arrives in fragments rather than as a façade.

Inside, the giveaway is that the rooms are the wrong shape for a museum. They are the proportions of an apartment: four linked rooms on the second floor, doorways on an axis, windows down one side. That is exactly what they were — the apartment Julius II chose as his own residence.

Every surface is painted, floor to vault. Walls and ceilings carry figures at architectural scale, so there is no neutral ground anywhere to rest the eye.

Then a small room, and the register changes completely. The Niccoline Chapel is a cell the size of a large study, set into the top two floors of a medieval tower, its four walls covered in two superimposed bands of narrative that run the whole way round. The frescoes start on the wall to the right of the altar, towards the pope's own chambers, and finish on the opposite wall — towards the room where the Lansquenet Guard was stationed. The pope at one end, his guard at the other, and the martyrdoms of two deacons in between.

Above, the vault splits into four webs with the Four Evangelists, and the eight Doctors of the Church sit in niches on the arches around them.

The Raphael Rooms

Four rooms of the apartment on the second floor that Julius II della Rovere (pope 1503–1513) chose as his own residence, used also by his successors. Painted by Raphael and his pupils, 1508–1524.

The Niccoline Chapel

In the heart of the Apostolic Palace, in the last two floors of a thirteenth-century tower. Named for Nicholas V (Tommaso Parentucelli, 1447–1455), who ordered it built.

Beato Angelico's frescoes

Assigned by two payments of February–March 1448 to the Dominican Fra Giovanni da Fiesole (c.1395–1455). One of the capital works of the Italian fifteenth century, and probably the summit of his Christian Humanism.

Stephen and Lawrence, in parallel

Two superimposed registers round the whole room, from the two deacons' consecrations to their martyrdoms, running from the wall towards the pope's chambers to the wall towards the Lansquenet Guard's room.

The vault

Four webs with the Four Evangelists, their authority transmitted to the eight Doctors of the Church in niches on the framing arches.

The Borgia Apartment

Named for Rodrigo de Borja y Doms, italianised as Borgia, elected on the death of Innocent VIII as Alexander VI.

The Sistine Chapel

On the same Vatican Museums hours as the rest: Mon–Sat 8.00–20.00, and the free last Sunday 9.00–14.00.

The Prefecture of the Papal Household

Runs the palace's public life: papal ceremonies apart from their liturgical aspect, the order of precedence, the antechamber, and the public, special and private audiences. A Prefect and a Regent, five-year terms.