Borgia Apartments

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The Borgia Apartments are a suite of rooms in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, adapted for personal use by Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo de Borja). In the late 15th century, he commissioned the Italian painter Bernardino di Betto (Pinturicchio) and his studio to decorate them with frescoes. The paintings and frescoes, which were executed between 1492 and 1494, drew on a complex iconographic program that used themes from medieval encyclopedias, adding an eschatological layer of meaning celebrating the supposedly divine origins of the Borgias. Five of the six apartments include frescoes painted in the vault. The upper register of the vaults contain paintings, while the lower registers are decorated with tapestries and gold. Recent cleaning of Pinturicchio's fresco The Resurrection has revealed a scene believed to be the earliest known European depiction of Native Americans, painted just two years after Christopher Columbus returned from the New World. The Borgia Apartments includes six rooms...

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