Il Museo is housed in the former Churches of the confraternity of the SS. Rosario and the archconfraternity of San Prisco, located in the historic center of Mirabella Eclano. The museum area also includes some rooms formerly used as meeting places for the two lay associations, including the former Chapel of the Madonna del Gonfalone with the precious 18th-century majolica floor. In some rooms, beneath the walking surface, during the renovation work of the buildings, masonry traces from the modern era (approximately 15th-17th century), circular grain pits, a remote paving structure, and a trapezoidal kiln, possibly used for casting a bell (13th century), were uncovered, visible through a transparent crystal walkable floor superstructure. The museum spaces are organized into eight sections: sec. no.1, 18th-century liturgical vestments; sec. no.2, confraternal insignia and ornaments 18th-19th centuries, a canvas by M. Ricciardi from the 18th century, embossed brass basins for collecting offerings from the 15th and 16th centuries; sec. no.3, 18th-century Neapolitan silverware, worked in embossing or chasing: pyxides, reliquaries, censers, small boats, monstrances, chalices, etc. Of notable importance is the processional cross from 1682, the reliquary bust of San Prisco; sec. no.4, cope and dalmatic from the second half of the 18th century; sec. no.5, choir books, missals, antiphonaries dated from the 16th to the 18th century; sec. no.6, documentary heritage: notarial acts, parish registers, parish chronicles, papal and episcopal briefs, etc.; sec. no.7 includes the most significant work of the Museum: the Exultet or Quintodecimo Scroll, one of the oldest hymns of the Roman Rite Catholic liturgy. There are seven parchments in total, bound together, forming two codicological units, that is, two groups distinct in artistic quality, era, and location. The parchments thus joined form a scroll 3.62 m long, with an average width of 22.50 cm. The text, written in Beneventan script, is enriched with watercolor miniatures. This type of liturgical scroll is an exceptional product, typical of the monastic and episcopal scriptoria of the southern Middle Ages, or more precisely of the Benevento-Cassino cultural area. In this section, a significant selection of important parchments from the parish archive is also exhibited, among which stands out a small parchment (mm 165×120) of the “relics kept in the high altar of the Church of Santa Maria” of Mirabella, written in 15th-century Gothic-Beneventan script. The exhibition space also contains three choir books (Psalter from 1759, Antiphonary from 1748, and Gradual from 1736), published in Venice in the 18th century, with Gregorian notation. Particularly interesting is also the canvas depicting the Madonna del Gonfalone; sec. no. 8, collects six bells, among which an ancient Angevin bell, dated 1274.
Information about the Civic Museum of Sacred Art
Via Eclano, 20
83036 Mirabella Eclano (Avellino)
0825 447078
masmirabella@libero.it
Source: MIBACT
