Vatican Museums

The exhibition initiatives of Museums at Work return following the summer break: as usual, in the evocative spaces of the Vatican Pinacoteca and always with highly original and symbolic museum projects.
Starting from Monday 23 September, two little-known fourteenth-century figures, Chiara di Damiano and the bishop Jean d’Amiel, will be the protagonists of the exhibition “Clare of Montefalco and Jean d’Amiel. Devotion and commission in two restored paintings of the Vatican Museums”.

Clare and Jean never had the opportunity to meet each other in life, despite the intersection of their histories due to two pictorial works (displayed for the occasion in Room XVII of the Pinacoteca) and an oratory, the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Montefalco, built at the behest of the Saint and frescoed upon request by the bishop.
The backdrop consists of Montefalco (an Italian municipality in the province of Perugia) in the first half of the fourteenth century, the papacy in Avignon and, above all, the intense popular devotion that artists, still anonymous and of great quality, knew how to interpret with rare efficacy.

The exhibition project reveals to the public at large – after new scientific analyses and detailed restoration in the laboratories of the Vatican Museums – two works that usually furnish the Holy Father’s representative apartments: the Polyptych of the Church of Saint Francis and the Dossal of the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Montefalco. The paintings were loaned last year for the Umbrian exhibition
“Capolavori del Trecento. Il cantiere di Giotto, Spoleto e l’Appennino” (Masterpieces of the Fourteenth Century. The workshop of Giotto, Spoleto and the Appenines) as part of the territorial initiatives for promoting and highlighting art implemented in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that struck Central Italy in 2016.