Museo della Cattedrale

Set in a deconsecrated church near the Duomo, Ferrara's Cathedral Museum gathers treasures from one of Emilia-Romagna's great medieval foundations. Painted organ shutters by Cosme Tura, Romanesque reliefs of the months and embroidered tapestries tell nine centuries of the cathedral's story in a building that is itself a piece of Ferrarese history.

Why it matters

Most Italian cities scatter their cathedral treasures; Ferrara keeps almost all of them under one roof. The museum was created in 1929 by a joint decision of the Cathedral Chapter and the Municipality, an unusually mixed public-and-church arrangement, and in 2000 it moved into the former church and complex of San Romano, a short street east of Piazza Trento e Trieste. The museum holds works made for the cathedral of San Giorgio, many of which remained in Ferrara. The collection preserves rare evidence of Renaissance Ferrara's ceremonial splendour and spans from the Early Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

What to notice

Among the museum's major works are the organ shutters painted by Cosme Tura, showing Saint George and the dragon and an Annunciation, considered important examples of fifteenth-century Italian painting. The carved reliefs of the months by the anonymous Maestro dei Mesi, dated to around 1225–1230, once decorated a lost portal of the medieval cathedral and show the labours and pleasures of the calendar year with startling liveliness. Jacopo della Quercia's Madonna della melagrana, carved between 1403 and 1406, anchors the sculpture section, which also includes quattrocento works by artists such as Filippo Solari, Andrea da Carona and Bernardo Rossellino. The collection also includes twenty-four choir books illuminated from 1481 by Guglielmo Giraldi, Martino da Modena and Jacopo Filippo Medici, and monumental tapestries with the Stories of Saints George and Maurelius, woven in Brussels between 1551 and 1553 by Johannes Karcher from designs by Garofalo and Camillo Filippi.

Context and history

The museum owes its existence to Giuseppe Agnelli, long-time director of the Ariostea Library, who in the 1920s persuaded the Chapter and the Municipality to pool their holdings. Its legal structure, regulated by a special convention, was for a long time unique in Italy: works owned by the church and by the city are exhibited together as a single itinerary. The move to San Romano in 2000 gave the collection far more space and an appropriate backdrop, since the former church is one of Ferrara's oldest sacred sites. The civic culture service has since recognised the museum's standard of interpretation with a quality-museum designation from the regional heritage institute. In 2021, lightning badly damaged the cathedral's marble facade, prompting a restoration campaign. The museum's holdings preserve the cathedral's medieval and Renaissance heritage.