Museo Raffaelli

In the crypt beneath Gemona's sanctuary of Sant'Antonio, the Museo Renato Raffaelli shows more than a hundred paintings and sculptures, mostly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Franciscan works from Gemona, Capodistria and Feltre, gathered around the Pinacoteca Antoniana founded in 1968.

Why it matters

The museum preserves the artistic heritage of Gemona’s sanctuary of Sant’Antonio, traditionally associated with St Anthony of Padua. Its core is the Pinacoteca Antoniana, founded in 1968 to conserve works no longer used in liturgy and displayed near the sanctuary before the 1976 earthquake. The collection now has its home in the crypt of the new sanctuary hall. The museum is named for Renato Raffaelli, a Gemona-born engineer and benefactor of the Franciscan convent and its cultural initiatives; its holdings also include works from Capodistria and Feltre.

What to notice

The collection opens with Sant'Antonio e il Bambino Gesù by Giovanni Battista Tiani, a Gemona painter who lived from 1671 to 1737, flanked by two eighteenth-century canvases of unknown authorship, the Addolorata and the Madonna delle lacrime. Numerous canvases by Melchior Widmar follow; the Swiss painter worked in Gemona in the second half of the seventeenth century. Among the works is the Madonna Bella, a fifteenth-century carved, painted and gilded wooden Madonna from the Salzburg school. The collection also includes works from the former convent of Sant'Anna in Capodistria, now Koper in Slovenia, dated from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, and several canvases from the former Sacred Heart convent in Feltre.

Context and history

The sanctuary complex predates the museum by seven centuries. A document of Patriarch Bertoldo of Aquileia, probably from 1219, is among the early evidence of the Friars Minor in Friuli. A plaque records that St Anthony had a chapel built there in honour of the Madonna delle Grazie; the first sanctuary rose around it in 1248 as a single Romanesque nave. Tradition places Anthony’s stay in Gemona in 1227 or 1228 and identifies a cell, kept as an oratory until 1902, as his lodging. The sanctuary is also described as the first Antonian sanctuary in the world. The 1976 earthquake destroyed the sanctuary. Reconstruction gave the museum its present setting beneath the new hall, bringing together the pre-earthquake Pinacoteca Antoniana and works from Franciscan houses in Capodistria and Feltre.