Museo di Sant'Agostino

At Piazza Sarzano, the former Augustinian church—described by the civic museums as Genoa’s largest conserved Gothic church—stands beside a triangular cloister. The Museum of Sant’Agostino displays sculpture and fresco fragments from churches across the city, including angels Giovanni Pisano carved for a queen of the Romans.

Why it matters

The complex is part of the museum’s historical significance. A thirteenth-century Augustinian church — the official presentation calls it the largest Gothic church conserved in the city — stands beside a triangular cloister whose unusual geometry reflects the constraints of its hillside site. The museum was inaugurated in 1939 as the Museo di Architettura e Scultura Ligure, using the former church to display sculpture removed from altered or demolished buildings.

The building was heavily damaged during the Second World War. The museum reopened in 1984 in spaces designed by Franco Albini and Franca Helg. Its collection includes what the civic museums describe as a monumental archive of Genoa: capitals, tombs, sarcophagi and fresco cycles lifted from churches destroyed or reworked, from antiquity to the nineteenth century.

What to notice

Two funerary monuments are among the collection’s highlights. The first is the sculptural group Giovanni Pisano made for Margherita of Brabant, wife of Emperor Henry VII, who died in Genoa in December 1311 at thirty-six. The sculptural group represents the elevatio animae: the queen's body rising, gaze lifted to heaven, hoisted by two headless angels in Apuan marble. Carved for her tomb in the church of San Francesco di Castelletto, dispersed after that church's demolition and rescued again through the Duchess of Galliera's legacy, the group is a notable example of medieval sculpture.

The second is the recumbent effigy of Simone Boccanegra, first doge of Genoa, from his tomb of 1363 in the same church of San Francesco — described by the museum as one of the earliest masterpieces of Italian portrait sculpture. Around them: Manfredino da Pistoia's fresco of Christ in the House of Simon, capitals from San Tommaso, sarcophagi of the Doria, a marble polyptych from Santa Maria della Pace, and cloister storerooms whose fragments from San Silvestro and Santa Maria in Passione keep surfacing through the deposits programme.

Context and history

The museum's life has run in phases. Inaugurated in 1939 as the Museo di Architettura e Scultura Ligure, it was wrecked by wartime bombing and reborn in 1984 inside Albini and Helg's sober modern installations. A further renovation programme, titled “Verso un nuovo museo,” has addressed the building’s structure and exhibition spaces. The project continues the museum’s adaptation of the historic complex for the collection.