Artistic artifacts and figurative testimonies are indeed closely linked to the worship and spirituality expressed by local communities: a production of high, sometimes very high, quality accompanying the history of the Diocese is presented, chronologically, in the museum’s rooms.
Roman period archaeological finds and stone materials, collected in the evocative underground environments, illustrate the site’s most remote history. The luminous “gold backgrounds” by Barnaba da Modena and a fragment of the fresco executed in 1468 by the Lombard Cristoforo De’ Mottis for the chapel of Marini in the Cathedral exemplify painting in Liguria in the 14th and 15th centuries, while contemporary sculpture is represented by the exceptional funerary monument of Cardinal Luca Fieschi, the work of a Pisan workshop active around the mid-14th century.
The magnificent Polyptych of San Lazzaro by Pietro Francesco Sacchi, the altarpiece with the Stories of the Baptist painted by Teramo Piaggio and Andrea Semino, the Pietà with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Nicholas of Tolentino by Agostino Bombelli document, along with other works, the evolution of figurative culture in Genoa in the first half of the 16th century. Of extraordinary charm is a chasuble embroidered with the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, created by an unknown Flemish embroiderer around 1515.
A little further on is a fine silver repositorium, embossed, chased, and partially gilded, offered in 1615 to the Church of San Siro by Placidia Doria, niece of the great Admiral, whose portrait adorns the base band next to that of the donor.
On the first floor, in two rooms where fragments of interesting medieval frescoes are preserved on the walls, stand out a precious Byzantine-style Staurotheca Cross and a series of German-made brass basins, embossed, chased, and punched (15th and 16th centuries).
A section dedicated to the exhibition of furniture, vestments, and articles, presented with a scenic setup that evokes the suggestion of a Baroque altar apparatus and the choreography of a procession. The Madonna of Loreto by Domenico Fiasella and the imposing canvases by Gregorio De Ferrari, Transit of Saint Scholastica and Tobias Burying the Dead, finally constitute magnificent examples of the great artistic season in Genoa.
A very rich heritage of artworks testifying to the deep Christian tradition and the splendor of a Republic that, in 1637, wished to crown the Virgin Mary “Queen of the City”, as depicted a little further on in the evocative 18th-century frescoes of the upper ring of the Cloister.
A section dedicated to the exhibition of furniture, vestments, and articles, presented with a scenic setup that evokes the suggestion of a Baroque altar apparatus and the choreography of a procession. The Madonna of Loreto by Domenico Fiasella and the imposing canvases by Gregorio De Ferrari, Transit of Saint Scholastica and Tobias Burying the Dead, finally constitute magnificent examples of the great artistic season in Genoa.
A very rich heritage of artworks testifying to the deep Christian tradition and the splendor of a Republic that, in 1637, wished to crown the Virgin Mary “Queen of the City”, as depicted a little further on in the evocative 18th-century frescoes of the upper ring of the Cloister.
