The Vatican Museums on Wednesday announced a five-year, $5.5 million project to clean and restore the Raphael Loggia, a 65-meter-long, 4-meter-wide corridor in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace that is not open to the public and is used by popes and presidents on the way to their audiences.
A corridor for rulers, not the ruled
The passageway, attributed to Renaissance master Raphael, sits on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace and overlooks the palace’s San Damaso courtyard. Visitors to the pope or the Secretariat of State walk along it en route to their audiences, while ordinary people do not get access to the space itself. Pope Leo XIV, who moved back into the Apostolic Palace after Pope Francis famously stayed away, has his private apartments upstairs but walks along the corridor when going to audiences.
The restoration is the first major face-lift in more than 500 years for a passageway that was conceived by Raphael between 1517 and 1519 as one of his last commissions for Pope Leo X. The Vatican said the corridor’s 13 arched bays are considered such a spectacular example of figurative painting that they were widely copied, including a full-scale replica at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Paolo Violini, in charge of painting restoration at the Vatican Museums, said the Raphael Loggia was open to the elements until 1813 and suffered damage from rain and exposure. He said that even after windows were installed, the artworks suffered further because the windows trapped heat and humidity, leaving the loggia in a particularly fragile state that requires special care. Restorers will use hand-held lasers to clean and restore the stucco and wall paintings, using a dry cleaning method because the paints are water soluble and would suffer further if cleaned in a more traditional way or with chemical solvents, Violini said.
Money, patronage and the public relations layer
The work is being done in partnership with the World Monuments Fund and is being financed by the Stephen A. Schwarzman Foundation, a New York-based philanthropy. At a press conference Wednesday, Schwarzman said the foundation’s overall contribution to the project was more than $14 million, including $5.5 million for the restoration and the rest for digitizing images of the loggia so the public can appreciate it, funding a documentary of the renovation and endowing a training program for art restorers at a Swiss university.
That public-facing package comes alongside a practical change to the corridor itself: the Vatican plans to replace the arched windows of the loggia with special glass that filters out the sun’s harmful rays. The project is framed as preservation, but the facts on the ground are simpler: a private route for papal and state audiences is getting a heavily funded overhaul, with a philanthropy underwriting both the physical work and the media layer around it.
The palace and its patrons
The Raphael Loggia is part of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, a space built for hierarchy and access control, where the corridor functions as a passage walked by popes and presidents. Its restoration is being handled through institutional partnership and private philanthropy, with the World Monuments Fund and the Stephen A. Schwarzman Foundation attached to the project from the start.
The Vatican Museums said the loggia’s artworks include biblical scenes from the Old Testament and New Testament, as well as botanical motifs in painting and stucco. The corridor’s status as one of the highest expressions of Renaissance figurative art is part of why it has been preserved, copied and now restored again, while remaining closed to the public.
The project’s scale, its donor backing and its location inside the Apostolic Palace all underline the same arrangement: a space reserved for power is maintained by institutions and wealthy patrons, while access for everyone else remains off the table.