MuCA - Museo della Cattedrale di Anagni

Behind Anagni's cathedral, the MuCA preserves the chapter library, the treasury with its Boniface VIII hangings, a first-century mithraeum later dedicated to St Thomas Becket, and the famous crypt.

Why it matters

Anagni's cathedral has been administered by a chapter since at least the eleventh century, and the museum gathers the material inheritance of everything that history produced on this hill. The museum brings together material from the chapter library and treasury with the crypt of San Magno, whose fresco cycle is a major surviving work of medieval painting.

What to notice

The museum's rooms include the Biblioteca and Sala Capitolare, the Sagrestia Nuova with chalices, mitres and reliquaries, and the Antico Tesoro with medieval hangings associated with Boniface VIII. The cathedral preserves medieval liturgical fittings, while the underground frescoed ambulatory connects the Oratorio di San Thomas Becket with the crypt. The lapidary includes Cosmatesque marble work and ninth-century plutei from the earlier cathedral.

Context and history

The museum's most singular room began life as a mithraeum of the first or second century AD, still showing its original architecture and the upturned-hull vault, with the ancient altar and blood channel against the rear wall. It was later dedicated to Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered in Canterbury in 1170 and canonized in 1173 by Pope Alexander III at Segni, a short distance away. Because Becket appears as a saint on the rear wall, the paintings must postdate 1173. The vaults carry a Genesis cycle in four registers, from the Creation through the Flood; the presbytery walls pair an apostle series with four panels of Becket's life and martyrdom, the third showing the knights' attack at Canterbury, and a sinopia of a knight with a crusader's shield nearby has been read as a Templar. The room later served as a burial ground for the cathedral canons, which damaged the paintings.