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 its fine eighteenth-century majolica floor. In some areas, beneath the walking surface, during the renovation works of the buildings, modern-era masonry traces (approx. 15th-17th century), circular granary pits, a remote paving structure, and a trapezoidal furnace, possibly used for casting a bell (13th century), became visible through an overlay structure made of transparent walkable crystal flooring. The museum spaces are organized into eight sections: sec. no.1, 18th-century liturgical vestments; sec. no.2, eighteenth-nineteenth-century confraternal emblems and ornaments, a painting by M. Ricciardi from the 18th century, embossed brass bowls for collecting offerings from the 15th and 16th centuries; sec. no.3, Neapolitan 18th-century silverware, worked with embossing or chasing: pyxides, reliquaries, censers, boats, monstrances, chalices, etc. Of notable importance is the processional cross from 1682 and the reliquary bust of San Prisco; sec. no.4, chasuble and dalmatic from the second half of the 18th century; sec. no.5, lectern covers, missals, antiphonaries dating from the 16th to the 18th century; sec. no.6, documentary heritage: notarial deeds, parish books, 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 Catholic liturgy of the Roman rite. Altogether there are seven parchments, bound together, forming two codicological units, that is, two groups distinct by artistic quality, period, and location. The parchments thus united form a scroll of 3.62 m length 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 southern medieval Italy or rather of the Beneventan-Cassinese 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 preserved in the main 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. The painting depicting the Madonna del Gonfalone is also particularly interesting; sec. no. 8 collects six bells, including 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
