Museo dell'Opera del Duomo

The Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Prato preserves works made for the cathedral and records the history of the Sacra Cintola, the Marian girdle central to the city's religious life. Its collection includes Donatello's original parapet reliefs from the cathedral pulpit, paintings, silver, textiles and archaeological remains.

Why it matters

The museum brings together works associated with worship and civic identity in Prato. Its centrepiece is the outer parapet of the cathedral's pulpit, carved by Donatello and his assistants between 1434 and 1438. The dancing putti once adorned the outdoor pulpit created with Michelozzo for public displays of the Sacra Cintola. The collection also includes paintings from the twelfth to nineteenth centuries, cathedral silver, sacred vestments and objects connected with devotion to the relic.

What to notice

The Sala del Pulpito preserves Donatello's reliefs, once part of the pulpit used during major public displays of the Sacra Cintola at Christmas, Easter, 1 May, 15 August and 8 September. The surviving eastern arm of the Romanesque cloister is decorated with marble inlay. Beneath the Gothic transept chapels, the vaulted burial chambers known as Le Volte retain sculpted arms and painted insignia; burials took place there from 1326 into the late eighteenth century. The Sala della Cintola contains pulpit fragments, silverware, reliefs and textiles associated with the relic. Other works include Filippo Lippi's Funeral of Saint Jerome altarpiece, commissioned around 1453 by Geminiano Inghirami, and choir books and vestments donated around 1590 by Alessandro de' Medici, later Pope Leo XI. Excavations beneath the bishop's palace have yielded ceramics spanning Etruscan times to the fifteenth century.

Context and history

The diocesan museum was inaugurated in 1967 and developed in stages to preserve works from across the diocese. A renovation campaign between 1996 and 2006 reorganised its collections in spaces including the Romanesque cloister, the burial chambers and parts of the Palazzo Vescovile. A stretch of the twelfth-century city wall survives in one room. Rooms in the Palazzo dei Proposti were built around 1386; the corporation's library was housed there from 1452, the year Antonio di Minato painted their monochrome decoration. The Cappella dei Battuti di Santo Stefano preserves frescoes by fourteenth-century artists and by Pietro and Antonio di Miniato in the early Quattrocento.