I never understood the benefit of public museums, especially in the internet age.
If you want to look at some artifacts without touching it, you could google it and see it.
Also in public museums a lot of artifacts get damaged due to visitors behaviors.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep the old artifacts at storage facility and release a high quality pictures of it instead of putting it in a museum?
Is there is a benefit for public museums?
I don’t know enough about those to comment. I have not been there yet.
Given how much history and artifacts the Vatican can assemble, they’re likely on the same scale, if on differing topics.
If you’re looking for religious artifact collections, the Bode in Berlin has a huge collection. It’s very deep for Christian iconography, as well as later paintings and sculpture. They also have some Greek materials. If you want Roman sculpture the Altes Museum (especially the rotunda) is phenomenal.
Of course the British Museum is just frakkin amazing end to end. When I was trying to navigate there (I was a bit lost) and wondered what the cluster of people were looking at next to me, and it turned out to be THE Rosetta Stone, holy shit. Worth the trip.