Museo Civico d'Arte di Palazzo Ricchieri

When Count Lucio Ernesto Ricchieri handed his family palace to the city in 1949, Pordenone gained the art museum it still lives by: a nobly frescoed thirteenth-century shell where panels, canvases, sculpture and furniture trace Friulian taste from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century.

Why it matters

Palazzo Ricchieri is both monument and collection. The palace itself — one of the oldest noble houses on Pordenone's main street — comes with a carved stone stairway bearing the family arms, two silver eagles and flowering garlands on red, alongside painted portraits of the Ricchieri dynasty's condottieri, merchants and churchmen. The museum opened in 1972, closed for rearrangement and reopened in 1996. As the civic gallery, it documents the Veneto-Friulian tradition through painting on panel and canvas, drawings, detached frescoes, wooden sculpture, furniture, goldwork and ceramics, covering the span from the Middle Ages to the present. Its tie to the Duomo across the way makes it essential context for the city's great painter.

What to notice

Four panels of about 1534 are among the gallery's significant works: they came from the baptismal font of the Duomo of San Marco, and their scenes — drawn from the life of Saint John the Baptist — address the city's newborn, civic art at its most local. Elsewhere the sequence lets you watch a regional school develop: late-medieval panel painting, Renaissance portraiture, the fluid Baroque of Friulan decorators, and the nineteenth-century canvases of Michelangelo Grigoletti's circle, all under frescoed ceilings. The stairway and family portrait gallery convey the self-image of a single aristocratic line that shaped the city from 1347, when a Ricchieri bequest to a small oratory first appears in the documents.

Context and history

The palace grew on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II during the mercantile boom of the Duecento, and the Ricchieri family held a place among Pordenone's leading houses for centuries. In 1949 Lucio Ernesto Ricchieri donated the building to the city expressly so it could become a cultural centre; after restoration, the civic art museum was inaugurated there in 1972 with core works already bolstered by gifts from collectors and artists. A later campaign reinstalled the galleries and the museum reopened in 1996 with the room sequence still in use. The collection has never stopped growing through donation — a pattern that began with the founder's own gesture — and today the museum anchors Pordenone's network of civic institutions alongside the archaeological and natural-history collections.