Il Museo Diocesano di Potenza, set up in the ground floor room of the seventeenth-century building of the former Seminary, recently opened to the public, represents for those who visit it an important opportunity to ‘recognize’, through the works, the main peculiarities that distinguish the artistic culture of our region and the history of the ancient diocese of Potenza mediated by the story of the microhistory of each individual asset.
The museum route presents, in this first installation, sacred furnishings and objects from the cathedral and some city parishes: works from the 16th to the 20th century.
The sacred silverware objects from the Cathedral Treasury, many of which are exhibited to the public for the first time: chalices, pyxes, crosses, reliquaries, monstrances, made by Neapolitan silversmiths between the 16th and 19th centuries. Most of the silverware was donated by generous bishops who led the Diocese of Potenza: Carlo Pignatelli, Gaetano Avigliano, Bartolomeo De Cesare, Ignazio Marolda, Michelangelo Pieramico.
The installation also includes paintings on canvas and wood, in particular, from the Bishop’s Palace come the two canvases depicting the Madonna with Child between Saint Anthony and Saint Philip Neri and the Madonna of the Rosary, both of the 17th century, and from the Church of St. Francis the Virgin breastfeeding the sleeping Child (end of the 17th – early 18th century) and the Madonna with Child (first half of the 17th century). The five tablets with the Stories of Saint Anthony, surviving side panels of an icon, are dated ‘March 1645’.
Ancient texts are exhibited, including the illuminated Bible of the 15th century and the parish register of 1600, preserved in the Cathedral archive, and finally some textile artifacts, among which stands out a nineteenth-century liturgical vestment commissioned by Bishop Ignazio Marolda and three mitres.
To these works, which constitute the fixed and central core of the museum installation, will be added artistic testimonies temporarily taken from churches of other municipalities of the Diocese, according to criteria dictated by precise thematic choices.
Information about the Diocesan Museum of Potenza
Via Vescovado, 1
85100 Potenza (Potenza)
097121637 – 0971283110
museodiocesanopotenza@gmail.com
Source: MIBACT
