Museo Capitolare di Piacenza

The Capitular Museum of Piacenza preserves paintings, reliquaries and liturgical objects connected with the Basilica of Sant’Antonino. Its collection includes medieval wooden dossals, a reliquary of the Holy Thorn and illuminated choir-book fragments.

Why it matters

The Museo Capitolare is the treasury museum of Sant’Antonino. It occupies sixteenth-century rooms beside the basilica, above the Capitular Sacristy, and brings together objects from the church treasury and furnishings from chapels demolished between 1915 and 1930. The collection reflects the artistic and devotional life of the collegiate church.

What to notice

Two wooden dossals are attributed to the Master of the Dossale di Sant’Antonino: one, dated around 1425–30, narrates eight episodes from the patron saint’s life; the other, from the mid-fifteenth century, shows God the Father blessing among six prophets. A third dossal, painted between 1470 and 1480 by an unknown Piacentine artist, sets a Crucifixion beside Saints Augustine, Jerome, Gregory and Ambrose. The paintings include a Nativity of Mary attributed to Giulio Cesare Procaccini and a Coronation of the Virgin by Giovanni Battista Trotti, known as il Malosso. Two oil sketches by Robert de Longe were prepared for the saint’s life scenes frescoed in the presbytery in 1693–95. The liturgical objects include the Reliquary of the Holy Thorn, made in 1641 by Piacentine silversmith Angelo Caccialupi, a rayed monstrance by German goldsmith Giuseppe Bauer, active in Italy as Agricola, and a wrought-iron processional brazier known as a brandazza.

Context and history

In the early twentieth century, side chapels of Sant’Antonino were demolished and their furnishings moved into safekeeping above the Capitular Sacristy. Documents and manuscripts partly passed to the adjacent Chapter Archive, while the museum preserves parchments, incunabula and objects linked to the chapter. Its holdings offer a record of a single collegiate church and its changing devotional furnishings.