Venus Felix (sculpture)

The Museo Pio Cristiano is one of the Vatican Museums. It houses various works of Christian antiquity.The museum was founded by Pope Pius IX in 1854, two years after the establishment of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology.

Augustus of Prima Porta (Italian: Augusto di Prima Porta) is a full-length portrait statue of Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of the Roman Empire. The marble statue stands 2.08 metres (6 ft 10 in) tall and weighs 1,000 kilograms (2,200 lb). The statue was discovered on April 20, 1863, during archaeological excavations directed by Giuseppe Gagliardi at the Villa of Livia owned by Augustus' third and final wife, Livia Drusilla in Prima Porta. Livia had retired to the villa after Augustus's death in AD 14. The statue was first publicized by the German archeologist G. Henzen and was put into the Bulletino dell'Instituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica (Rome 1863). Carved by expert Greek sculptors, the statue is assumed to be a copy of a lost bronze original displayed in Rome. The Augustus of Prima Porta is now displayed in the Braccio Nuovo (New Arm) of the Vatican Museums. Since its discovery, it has become the best known of Augustus' portraits and one of the most famous sculptures of the ancient world.

Bramante Staircase is the name given to two staircases in the Vatican Museums in the Vatican City State: the original stair, built in 1505, and a modern equivalent from 1932.

The Apollo Belvedere (also called the Belvedere Apollo, Apollo of the Belvedere, or Pythian Apollo) is a celebrated marble sculpture from classical antiquity. The Apollo is now thought to be an original Roman creation of Hadrianic date (c. 120–140 AD), though in a Hellenistic style. The distinctively Roman footwear is one reason scholars believe it is not a copy of an original Greek statue. It was rediscovered in central Italy in the late 15th century during the Italian Renaissance and was placed on semi-public display in the Vatican Palace in 1511, where it remains. It is now in the Cortile del Belvedere of the Pio-Clementine Museum of the Vatican Museums complex. From the mid-18th century it was considered the greatest ancient sculpture by ardent neoclassicists, and for centuries it epitomized the ideals of aesthetic perfection for Europeans and westernized parts of the world.

Anima Mundi (previously known as the Vatican Ethnological Museum) is a museum of ethnological art and artefacts in the Vatican City. It is part of the Vatican Museums.

The Vatican Museums (Italian: Musei Vaticani; Latin: Musea Vaticana) are the public museums of the Vatican City. They display works from the immense collection amassed by the Catholic Church and the papacy throughout the centuries, including several of the most well-known Roman sculptures and most important masterpieces of Renaissance art in the world. The museums contain roughly 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are on display, and currently employ 640 people who work in 40 different administrative, scholarly, and restoration departments.Pope Julius II founded the museums in the early 16th century. The Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling and altar wall decorated by Michelangelo, and the Stanze di Raffaello (decorated by Raphael) are on the visitor route through the Vatican Museums.In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Vatican Museums were visited by only 1,300,000 persons, a drop of 81 percent from the number of visitors in 2019, but still enough to rank the museums fourth among the most-visited art museums in the world.There are 24 galleries, or rooms, in total, with the Sistine Chapel, notably, being the last room visited within the Museum.

The Fontana della Pigna or simply Pigna ([ˈpiɲɲa], "pinecone") is a former Roman fountain which now decorates a vast niche in the wall of the Vatican facing the Cortile della Pigna, located in Vatican City, in Rome, Italy.

Charity with Four Children is a sculpture by the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Executed between 1627 and 1628, the work is housed in the Vatican Museums in Vatican City. The small terracotta sculpture represents Charity breast-feeding a child, with three other children playing. There is an imprint of Bernini's thumbprint in the clay.

The Gregorian Tower (Italian: Torre Gregoriana) or Tower of the Winds (Italian: Torre dei Venti) is a square tower and early modern observatory located above the Gallery of Maps, which connects the Villa Belvedere with the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City. The tower was built between 1578 and 1580 to a design by the Bolognese architect Ottaviano Mascherino (who was credited with building the Apostolic Palace) mainly to promote the study of astronomy for the Gregorian Calendar Reform which was commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII and promulgated in 1582. It was then also known as the Tower of Winds. The tower was also called "Specola Astronomica Vaticana", a reference to the Vatican Observatory. Four stages of progressive development have occurred since it was first established. The tower was an edifice of great value for astronomical observations made using a sundial as they provided essential confirmation of the need to reform the Julian calendar.

The Casina Pio IV (or Villa Pia) is a patrician villa in Vatican City which is now home to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. The predecessor of the present complex structure was begun in the spring of 1558 by Pope Paul IV in the Vatican Gardens, west of the Cortile del Belvedere. Paul IV commissioned the initial project of the 'Casina del Boschetto', as it was originally called, from an unknown architect; the first mention of the single-storey building can be found on 30 April 1558, and a notice of the following 6 May, says that the Pope spent "two thirds of his time at the Belvedere, where he has begun to build a fountain in the woods". Upon Paul IV's death on 18 August 1559, Pope Pius IV took on the project, which had not yet been completed, and, turning to Pirro Ligorio, improved it. The complex, as it was completed in 1562, comprised an elliptical cortile, two free-standing portals, and the loggia with its fountain. Rich sculptural stuccos, once supplemented by some fifty ancient Roman sculptures, enliven the exterior (illustration). A team of at least six major painters, including Federico Barocci, Federico Zuccari, and Santi di Tito and their assistants, frescoed the interiors.The Casina's rich and at times obscure iconographic programme, of the efficacy of baptism, the primacy of the papacy and the welcomed punitive powers of the Church, seems to have been inspired by Cardinal Charles Borromeo, nephew of Pius IV, who probably had it in mind as the headquarters for the Academy he was about to found, on 20 April 1562, called Accademia Noctes Vaticanae. Graham Smith suggests that the interrelated iconography of the interior frescoes was inspired by Cardinal Marcantonio da Mula. Pope Pius XI, the founder of the current Pontifical Academy of Sciences, made the Casina the Academy's current headquarters in 1936.

The Latinitas Foundation (Latin: Opus Fundatum Latinitas) was an organisation dedicated to furthering the education of Latin and the publication of articles in the language. It was established on 30 June 1976 by Pope Paul VI and was superseded by the Pontifical Academy for Latin (Pontificia Academia Latinitatis) which was established on 10 November 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI.

A pontifical academy is an academic honorary society established by or under the direction of the Holy See. Some were in existence well before they were accepted as "Pontifical."