Museo del Conservatorio di Santa Chiara

Behind Via Roma, the Museum of the Santa Chiara Conservatory occupies a former Poor Clares monastery founded in 1226. The complex became a girls’ conservatory in 1785. Its museum presents the church, choir and chapel together with paintings, embroidered textiles and reliquaries associated with centuries of enclosed life.

Why it matters

The Poor Clares inhabited the monastery for more than five centuries. When it became a lay conservatory in 1785, many of its buildings and furnishings remained together, along with objects made, acquired or received as dowries by the nuns. Since the mid-1990s the complex has been curated as a museum, preserving the relationship between the art and the rooms for which it was made.

What to notice

The church is a single-aisled space with open wooden roof trusses. Its late-seventeenth-century Baroque decoration came from the workshop of Antonio Domenico Bamberini. On the high altar is the Immacolata Concezione, signed and dated 1596 by Iacopo Chimenti, known as l’Empoli. Works by the same painter include a Saint Francis in Ecstasy and a Saint Clare Adoring the Blessed Sacrament. The side altars hold a Saint Anthony attributed to the workshop of Simone Pignoni and a Dead Christ Supported by Angels by Pier Francesco Foschi. A niche near the entrance contains the relics of Saint Craton, presented by Pope Alexander VII. The museum also displays painted crosses by Deodato Orlandi, dated 1301, and Iacopo di Mino del Pellicciaio, as well as Ludovico Cardi’s Noli me tangere. An ebony-and-ivory reliquary donated by the Buonaparte family and silk embroideries record the community’s devotional life.

Context and history

The current building dates to 1339 and was raised through the initiative of Michele Portigiani. A chapel of Santa Maria Maddalena, founded in 1352 by Lamberto di Stefano Buonincontri, stood near the cloister; its founder’s marble relief is preserved in the museum. In 1785, as part of Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo’s reforms, the monastery became a conservatory for girls’ education. Under the Kingdom of Italy the institute passed to the Ministry of Public Education. A religious order ran the boarding school from 1935 until it closed in 1975. The museum was established from the mid-1990s to preserve the complex’s artistic and devotional heritage.