MAR - Museo d'Arte della Città di Ravenna

MAR, Ravenna's civic art museum, combines a historic picture collection with modern and contemporary mosaic. Its home in the former monastery of Santa Maria in Porto connects Renaissance architecture with the continuing development of the city's artistic identity.

Why it matters

The museum extends Ravenna's mosaic story beyond the ancient monuments. Its collection brings together designs by painters and their interpretation in tesserae, placing mosaic alongside other forms of modern art rather than treating it only as a surviving early Christian technique.

What to notice

The monument to Guidarello Guidarelli, attributed to Tullio Lombardo, is a major work of Renaissance sculpture in the collection. Paintings include Vasari's Lamentation and Guercino's Saint Romualdo. Modern mosaics associated with artists such as Chagall, Guttuso and Vedova show different approaches to colour and surface. The Loggetta Lombardesca provides the building's distinctive architectural feature above the gardens.

Context and history

The former monastery was built in the early sixteenth century and later adapted to new uses. The civic picture collection developed in the nineteenth century. MAR's institutional reorganisation in 2002 was followed by the creation of the International Centre for Mosaic Documentation in 2003, adding research and documentation to the collections' cultural role.