Museo degli Exultet

Beside Bari's cathedral, on the first floor of the Archbishop's Palace, the diocesan museum guards one of the strangest treasures of medieval art: the Exultet scrolls, parchment rolls up to five metres long, sung from the ambo at the Easter Vigil and painted so that the congregation could see the images upright while the deacon sang the text.

Why it matters

Bari was one of the great centres of Beneventan liturgical writing, and the scrolls produced here between the tenth and thirteenth centuries are its masterpiece. The museum's core — the Exultet rolls and the Benedizionale — combines text, musical notation and narrative images on long parchment bands, written in the Beneventan script known as the Bari type, probably at the scriptorium of the cathedral or the monastery of San Benedetto. During the Easter ceremony the scrolls were unrolled over the ambo, and the miniatures were painted inverted so that worshippers facing the deacon could watch the story while hearing the chant. That is why a visit here explains not just art but the experience of medieval worship in Puglia.

What to notice

Look first at the mechanics of the rolls: the joining of parchment sheets, the columns of Beneventan notation, and the upside-down framing of each miniature, from Old Testament scenes to portraits of the donor clergy and the artisans named in the borders. The Benedizionale, the benedictional that accompanies the Exultet material, shows the same double life of text and image. Then turn to the cathedral's own history in the displays: thirteenth-century sculpture including Peregrino da Salerno's Tree of Life and capitals from Anseramo da Trani's ciborium trace the building's artistic evolution. The picture gallery holds the fourteenth-century Madonna degli Alemanni, Andrea Bordone's Risen Christ altarpiece and an Adoration of the Magi by Corrado Giaquinto, while Russian icons recall the shared devotion to Saint Nicholas that ties Bari to the Christian East.

Context and history

The museum belongs to the network of ecclesiastical heritage sites that the Archdiocese of Bari-Bitonto presents through the ArtEcclesiae portal, and it occupies the piano nobile of the Archbishop's Palace overlooking Piazza Odegitria, the square wedged between the cathedral and the old town's lanes. Its collections grew from the cathedral's treasury and from parishes of the old city: vestments and liturgical furnishings of the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, paintings displaced from altars, and sculpture recording the cathedral's medieval campaigns. The chronological route runs from the early Christian era through the Middle Ages, the post-Tridentine and Baroque periods, into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Exultet rolls are the justification for the museum's name and the rarest category: these festal scrolls were a specifically southern-Italian liturgical instrument, and Bari's examples in the Bari-type Beneventan script are among the defining products of that tradition.