Museo Diocesano San Matteo

The Diocesan Museum of San Matteo in Salerno preserves medieval ivories, an illustrated thirteenth-century Exultet roll, and paintings from southern Italy. It occupies the historic Archbishop's Seminary, a building later associated with Salerno's medical school.

Why it matters

The museum brings together important works from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. Its collection of medieval Christian ivory tablets is one of the most extensive to survive. Some tablets left Salerno during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are now held in museums elsewhere in Europe and North America; the Salerno collection preserves a substantial part of the cycle.

The museum also holds an illustrated Exultet roll, used in the Holy Saturday liturgy, and a painting gallery tracing southern Italian art from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century.

What to notice

The ivory cycle includes tablets with scenes from the Old and New Testaments. The painting collection includes a Crocifissione by Roberto d'Oderisio, a late-fourteenth-century Pietà with Saints Crispino and Crispiniano, a fifteenth-century Coronation of the Virgin from the Eboli school, and a Saint Michael the Archangel by Cristoforo Scacco, dated around 1503–1505. Works by Andrea Sabatini da Salerno include a Pietà with a carved and gilded frame.

Other holdings include the wooden Crocifisso detto del Barliario, a fifteenth-century gilded wooden Saint Joseph, painted terracottas, a lapidary with an inscription dated 1078, coins and liturgical vestments.

Context and history

The seminary's present neoclassical appearance reflects works commissioned in 1832 by Archbishop Lupoli. The building was the final seat of the Salerno medical school before its suppression in 1811. The museum's collection grew from works donated by Marchese Ruggi d'Aragona and Archbishop Isidoro Sánchez de Luna, objects from the cathedral sacristy, and later transfers, purchases and bequests.

The complex also houses the diocesan library and archive. A local legend links the crucifix's name, Barliario, to a magician said to have built the medieval aqueduct's “devils' bridges” in a single night.