Vatican City
Rome Italy
2016

https://m.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani-mobile/en/musei-del-papa/storia.html

"The Vatican, the Museum of Museums," not only houses the extensive collections of art, archaeology and ethno-anthropology gathered by the Popes over the centuries, but also contains some of the Apostolic Palace’s most extraordinary and artistically significant rooms.
Any history of the museums' collections should rightly begin with the history of the rooms that the Popes over the ages chose as places of residence or private prayer and reflection. The first ones, in chronological order, are the Niccoline Chapel and the Borgia Apartment.

In the first year of his papacy, Pope Nicholas V (Parentucelli), one of the greatest humanists of the time, called on Fra Angelico to decorate the private chapel of his apartments in the Apostolic Palace with a cycle of frescoes dedicated to St Stephen and St Lawrence. Fra Angelico, a renowned artist as well as a Dominican friar, depicted scenes from the saints' lives, drawn from the "Acts of the Apostles."
The decorations, richly detailed and full of meaningful allusions, make the Niccoline Chapel a perfect example of the link between religious and humanistic thought in fifteenth-century painting.

Art is evangelisation
Art, aside from being a credible witness to the beauty of creation, is also a tool of evangelisation. In the Church it exists above all to evangelise: through art – music, architecture, sculpture, painting – the Church explains and interprets the revelation. Let us look at the Sistine Chapel: what did Michelangelo do? He carried out a work of evangelisation. As in medieval cathedrals: the catechism was in the stone sculptures, since the people did not know how to read but instead learned by observing the sculptures. The Church has always used art to demonstrate the wonder of God’s creation and the dignity of man created in His image and semblance, as well as the power of death, and the beauty of Christ’s resurrection that brings rebirth to a world afflicted by sin. Beauty unites us and, as St. John Paul II said, quoting Dostoyevsky, will save us. Following Christ is not only true but also beautiful, able to fill our life with joy, even in everyday difficulties. In this sense beauty represents a way of encountering the Lord.