Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli Site Features

Michelangelo's Moses

Completed in 1515 for the tomb of Julius II, and the reason almost everyone comes. It was designed as one part of a free-standing monument of forty-seven statues and ended as the centre of a wall tomb. The horns are a translation. Moses is shown with them to connote the radiance of the Lord, because the Hebrew word for "beams of light" resembles the word for "horns" — a kind of iconographic symbolism common in early sacred art, and, as the sources note drily, horns are easier for a sculptor to carve than rays of light.

The chains of Saint Peter

In a reliquary beneath the main altar: the chains that bound Peter in Jerusalem, given by the Empress Eudoxia to Pope Leo I. By legend, when Leo compared them with the chain from Peter's final imprisonment in the Mamertine Prison in Rome, the two fused together. Since 1894 one link has been in St Peter's Church in Rutland, Vermont.

The tomb of Nicholas of Cusa

The fifteenth-century cardinal and philosopher, died 1464, in a tomb by Andrea Bregno with a relief of Cardinal Nicholas before St Peter.

Domenichino's work

The monument of Cardinal Girolamo Agucchi, which he designed, and the sacristy fresco of the Liberation of St Peter of 1604 — the church's founding story, painted a few metres from the relic itself.

Guercino and Roncalli

Two canvases by Guercino, of Saint Augustine and Saint Margaret, and a Deposition by Cristoforo Roncalli as the altarpiece of the first chapel on the left.

The grave of Antonio del Pollaiuolo

The Florentine painter and sculptor is buried at the left side of the entrance. He is the man who added the figures of Romulus and Remus to the Capitoline Wolf — so the two most famous infants in Rome are his work, and almost nobody stops at his tomb.

The Pontelli portico

The five-arched loggia of 1475 across the front, attributed to Baccio Pontelli, and the cloister of 1493–1503 attributed to Giuliano da Sangallo — now the courtyard of La Sapienza's Faculty of Engineering, which occupies the former convent and carries the same name.