Borgia Apartment

The Borgia Apartments are a suite of rooms in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, adapted for personal use by Pope Alexander VI (Rodrígo de Borgia). In the late 15th century, he commissioned the Italian painter Bernardino di Betto (Pinturicchio) and his studio to decorate them with frescos. 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 and celebrating the supposedly divine origins of the Borgias. 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 short years after Christopher Columbus returned from the New World.