Sistine Chapel goes online

The Sistine Chapel is now online.

The Vatican put its enormous art collection on the Web today, launching a new site for the Vatican Museums that it hopes will attract more tourists while also disseminating the Church’s message around the globe.

The high-tech site allows visitors to take a virtual tour of some of the dozen museums and galleries that make up the Vatican collection, zooming in on a frescoed panel in the Raphael Rooms or viewing Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel with a three-dimensional video.

Descriptions of the works accompany the images, translated into Italian, French, English, Spanish and German.

Vatican officials said the goal of the site was to give would-be tourists, scholars and curious Web browsers a sampling of the Vatican’s holdings while taking advantage of the Internet and the “universal language” of art to spread Pope John Paul’s message.

“The tool of the Web, with its enormous potential, allows us to get closer to an ever growing number of people to spread the message of evangelisation around the world,” said Cardinal Edmund Casimir Szoka, whose office oversees the Vatican’s museums and galleries.

The site was launched nearly eight years after the Vatican itself leaped into cyberspace with a Web site www.vatican.va that was mostly devoted to Vatican documents and information about the Roman curia. While there was a Vatican Museum link on the site, it contained little information.

Now through the same link, visitors can view entire galleries of the Egyptian museum, the Etruscan museum as well as the Pinacoteca painting gallery, the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel – part of a collection the UN culture agency, Unesco, has recognised for its place in the world’s cultural patrimony.