Samling av modern religiös konst

The Collection of Modern Religious Art in the Vatican Museums is rooted in a specific decision: to rebuild a relationship between the Church and contemporary artistic culture. The Vatican Museums describe the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art as emerging from Paul VI’s desire to reinstate this dialogue, and they place its public inauguration on 23 June 1973.

The same Vatican account explains that the collection was built through donations, paintings, sculpture, and graphic arts, by artists, collectors, and institutions, with many contacts linked to Paul VI’s address to the art world during an encounter in the Sixtinska kapellet on 7 May 1964. In that address, the pontiff highlighted the distance that had opened between the Church and contemporary art and expressed the hope of bringing them closer again, with the outcome being the constitution of a collection focused on contemporary religious art.

Over roughly a decade, this initiative expanded a smaller nucleus of nineteenth-century works and grew into a large body of modern material. Today, the Vatican states, the collection numbers around 8,000 works, while the selection displayed to the public offers a broad overview of twentieth-century Italian and international art, including major figures such as Van Gogh, Bacon, Chagall, de Chirico, Fontana, Burri, and Matisse.

This history explains why the experience feels so different inside the Vatican: it is not simply a “modern wing,” but an intentional statement about continuity—how sacred themes can persist even as artistic languages change. It is also why the collection’s placement along the Vatican itinerary matters: it becomes a bridge between Renaissance tradition and the Vatican’s most iconic spaces, offering visitors a fuller, more layered view of how art and belief have continued to speak to each other across time.