As the world's gaze falls on the Italian capital and the cardinals retreat to the Sistine Chapel to confer, we'll have a perfect chance to take in some of the glories of the Renaissance
Sede vacante: the throne of St Peter is about to fall officially vacant and soon the 115 cardinals eligible to vote for a new pope will gather in conclave at the Vatican.
It is going to be a great few weeks for art.
Sure, the election of a pope is an important time for the Catholic Church, but it is also a period when the world feasts its eyes on some of the most beautiful paintings, sculptures, buildings and public spaces on earth. Vatican City is a sumptuous theatre of power and glory created by Renaissance and baroque artists. As the world media await the name of a new pontiff, there will be little for cameras to show us except their awe-inspiring achievements.
At the heart of it all is of course the Sistine Chapel, where the cardinals will meet and be sealed off from the outside world to make their choice. They are not allowed to watch TV or read newspapers or go on Twitter but they will have plenty to keep them entertained – the paintings of Michelangelo that float on the ceiling above and loom on the altar wall. If Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling with its vision of creation has plenty to inspire, perhaps it is his altar wall painting of the Last Judgement that ought to focus the minds of the papal electors. Partly inspired by Dante, whose Christian epic The Divine Comedy Michelangelo knew off by heart, here is a riveting depiction of moral choice and its consequences.
But since the Sistine Chapel will be closed and what happens there is secret, cameras will in fact be showing the Vatican's open-air sights: the dome of St Peter's Basilica will as ever draw all eyes. Conceived by the architect Bramante in the early 16th-century, worked on by his successor Raphael, then by Sangallo, before it was finally set on the course to reality by Michelangelo, who raised its drum and left designs to be completed with mild alterations after his death in 1564, this is the supreme monument of the Renaissance. Below it spreads a masterpiece of the baroque, the exuberant 17th-century piazza shaped by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, with its enfolding colonnaded arms crowned by myriad statues.
Even the stone is special: a perforated, riven limestone found outside Rome, called travertine, allowed the Vatican architects to give their creations a particular heavenly grandeur. Bernini's massive columns circling St Peter's piazza are tubes of travertine. The facade of the basilica itself, built by Carlo Maderno in the early 17th century, also uses this noble stuff.
The Vatican is a collective creation seething with mystery. It is hard to disentangle all the different parts of palaces, loggias and corridors that outsiders glimpse from this secretive city's public spaces. Bramante's Belvedere Courtyard is now absorbed into the Vatican museums, crowded with rarities. But TV cameras will not be showing the opulent Roman-style bathroom that Raphael created within the Vatican for Cardinal Bibbiena. Nor are they likely to explore the Borgia apartments, or the interior of the Pope's fortress, Castel Sant'Angelo.
The most arcane political process in the western world is about to begin, against a backdrop as enigmatic as it is beautiful.