Most visitors reach the Sistine Chapel having seen almost nothing but antiquity and the Renaissance for two hours straight. Roman busts, then Raphael, then more Raphael, then suddenly Michelangelo overhead. So when a guide mentions that the Vatican Museums also hold works by Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall and Francis Bacon, people tend to assume they misheard. They didn’t. Since 1973 a long run of rooms beneath the Sistine Chapel, most of them the old Borgia Apartments, has held one of the more overlooked parts of the entire complex: the Collection of Modern Religious Art.
Why Paul VI built it
Pope Paul VI opened the collection in June 1973, and the timing was deliberate. The Church had just come through the Second Vatican Council, which spent real energy asking how faith should speak to the present rather than only to the past. Paul VI’s own answer, in part, was to invite living artists into the same institution that already owned Raphael and Michelangelo. He wrote to artists directly, asking for a renewed alliance between the Church and the people who make images. Hundreds of them responded with donations and loans, and the result was installed across 55 rooms, corridors and passages that had mostly sat unused since the Borgia family stopped living there in the 1500s.
It’s worth sitting with how unusual that decision was. This is an institution whose reputation rests almost entirely on works that are four, five, six hundred years old. Adding a wing of 20th-century painting and sculpture to that story was a statement about what the Church thought it was for: not a museum of a finished past, but a patron that intended to keep going.
The Borgia Apartments as a setting
The rooms themselves are not neutral white cubes. They were decorated by Pinturicchio in the 1490s for Pope Alexander VI, with painted ceilings, gilded stucco and frescoed lunettes that are Renaissance masterworks in their own right. Walking through them, you’re looking at a 15th-century interior with a Bacon or a Rouault hung on the wall in front of it. That collision is part of what makes the collection worth the detour. Curators didn’t strip the rooms back to make them look contemporary. The modern pieces sit inside a Borgia-era shell, which means the eye is doing two jobs at once: reading Pinturicchio’s ceiling and reading a 20th-century canvas hung a few metres below it.
That layering explains why the collection can feel disorienting on a first pass. Nothing here is trying to match the room. A stark, angular crucifixion can hang under a gilded coffered ceiling built for a Borgia pope, and the museum makes no attempt to soften the contrast.
What’s actually in the rooms
The collection runs to several hundred works, and it isn’t a themed survey of “Christian art” in the devotional sense. Much of it is simply 20th-century art on religious or existential subjects, gathered from artists who weren’t necessarily believers. Dalí is represented, along with Chagall, whose relationship to biblical imagery ran through most of his career regardless of the setting he painted it for. Francis Bacon appears too, and his presence is often the one that stops people, since his figures are about as far from Raphael’s calm as painting gets. Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse and Odilon Redon show up in various rooms, alongside sculpture and works on paper by a long list of artists who donated pieces directly to Paul VI’s project rather than having them acquired later.
The mix is genuinely uneven, as any collection built from donations tends to be. Some rooms have real weight. Others feel like minor pieces by major names, included because the artist offered them rather than because they were the strongest possible choice. That unevenness is worth knowing about going in, mostly so it doesn’t read as a flaw unique to this one museum. Almost every donated collection has the same texture.
What it’s like to walk through after the old masters
By the time most people reach these rooms, on the route many tours take toward the Sistine Chapel, they’ve already spent an hour or two absorbed in classical sculpture and Renaissance fresco. The shift is genuinely physical. Colour palettes change, subject matter loosens, and the pacing of the paintings themselves changes, since 20th-century work often asks to be looked at quickly and reacted to, rather than studied slowly the way a fresco cycle does. Some visitors find the change a relief, a chance to look at something that isn’t asking for art-historical homework. Others walk through without really registering it, still processing the Sistine ceiling they’re heading toward or have just left.
Guides who linger here tend to do it for a specific reason: the Bacon room, or a strong Rouault, gives a natural pause point in a day that’s otherwise front-loaded with famous names. It’s also one of the few stretches of the museum where a group can stand in front of something without a wall of other visitors doing the same, since most people move through quickly on their way to the Sistine Chapel.
Why it doesn’t fit the Vatican’s usual story
The Vatican Museums exist, broadly, to hold what the papacy has collected and commissioned across roughly five centuries, and the collection’s public identity leans hard on that depth. A 20th-century wing sits slightly outside that narrative, which is probably why it gets far less attention than the Sistine Chapel or the Raphael Rooms in most guidebooks and most tour itineraries. It doesn’t photograph as a single unmissable image the way the ceiling does, and it doesn’t have one work that functions as a headline. What it has instead is an argument: that a museum built on the Renaissance was still willing, in 1973, to say that religious art hadn’t stopped being made.
Practical notes if you want to see it
The Collection of Modern Religious Art is included in the standard Vatican Museums ticket, so there’s no separate charge and no separate booking. The rooms sit along the route toward the Sistine Chapel, which means almost every visitor passes near them without necessarily knowing they’re there, since signage inside the museum can be easy to miss when a group is focused on reaching the ceiling. If you want to actually stop and look rather than walk past, budget an extra twenty or thirty minutes into your visit and ask your guide, if you have one, to slow down through the Borgia Apartments specifically. On a self-guided visit, the collection is easiest to find by following signs for the Borgia Apartments rather than for “modern art,” since that’s still the name most staff and maps use for the space.
If you’d rather have someone point out the Bacon room and explain why a Pinturicchio ceiling sits above it, that kind of detour is exactly what a guided visit is for — you can see our Vatican tours for options that build in time for the rooms most people walk straight past.