Civic Museums of Padua

The Civic Museums of Padua, also known as the Musei Civici degli Eremitani, constitute a major museum complex in Padua, Veneto, Italy. Centered on the former Augustinian convent of the Eremitani and incorporating the renowned Cappella degli Scrovegni with Giotto's fresco cycle, the institution stands at Piazza Eremitani on the edge of Padua's historic center. The complex encompasses archaeological collections, a painting gallery spanning from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, and applied arts museums. It ranks among the most significant municipal museum systems in northern Italy, combining superlative medieval art with rich holdings of later periods.

The museum's origins trace to the suppression of ecclesiastical institutions and the consequent transfer of their artistic patrimony to civic ownership. The oldest nucleus emerged from the collection of the Canons Regular of San Giovanni di Verdara, made public in 1784 after the convent's suppression in 1783. Further acquisitions came from religious houses closed during the Napoleonic era. In 1825, Abbot Giuseppe Furlanetto exhibited his collection of Roman and Greek lapidary inscriptions in the logge of the Palazzo della Ragione, giving the museum its name. The collection expanded significantly through the 1864 donation of Leonardo Capodilista. Under patron Andrea Gloria, these holdings became municipal property, leading to establishment of the Pinacoteca alongside a civic library and archive. A pivotal moment occurred in 1857 when Emperor Franz Joseph, visiting Padua, granted paintings from suppressed religious corporations to the commune. The museum complex moved to its present location in 1985, housed in the cloisters of the former Eremitani convent, which had been restored and adapted between 1969 and 1986 to designs by architects Franco Albini and Franca Helg. In 2004, the Museo del Risorgimento e dell'età contemporanea was installed on the piano nobile of the historic Caffè Pedrocchi.

The Civic Museums comprise several distinct institutions. The Archaeological Museum holds pre-Roman artifacts from Paduan necropolises dating from the eighth to the third centuries B.C., including decorated vases from the third Atestine period, Paleovenetian stelae, votive objects, and Etruscan, Italic, and Paleovenetian bronzes. Its Roman section features the bust of Silenus, the funeral cippus of the dancer Claudia Toreuma, the monumental funerary aedicula of the Volumnii, and numerous late-Roman mosaics. Two rooms are devoted to Egyptian finds recovered by the Paduan explorer Giovanni Battista Belzoni. The Museum of Medieval and Modern Art contains a painting gallery of approximately three thousand works from the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries, plus extensive sculpture, decorative fragments, and architectural pieces. The Lapidarium, in the smaller cloister, gathers architectural and decorative fragments from Padua and its territory documenting the city from the Middle Ages through the fall of the Venetian Republic. At Palazzo Zuckermann, the Museum of Applied Arts displays over two thousand pieces including furniture, sacred vestments, devotional and liturgical objects, glass, carvings, ceramics, silver, ivories, and textiles. More than four hundred jewels come from the bequest of Leone Trieste in 1883. The Bottacin Museum, on the second floor, houses the predominantly numismatic collection donated by Triestine merchant and collector Nicola Bottacin in 1865, with over twenty thousand coins and medals arranged chronologically from pre-Roman specimens through Republican, Imperial, medieval, and Venetian issues, representing one of the world's most complete collections of Venetian coinage. The Risorgimento and Contemporary Age Museum preserves documents spanning a century and a half of Paduan and Italian history from the fall of the Republic of Venice in 1797 to the promulgation of the Italian Constitution in 1948.

The painting gallery includes works by Lorenzo Veneziano, Giovanni da Bologna, Francesco Squarcione, Jacopo Bellini, Lorenzo Costa, Girolamo Romano (called Romanino), Paolo Veronese, Antonio Rotta, Giorgione, Palma il Giovane, Quentin Metsys, Antonio Canova, Andrea Briosco, and Tiziano Aspetti. Specific notable works include Giotto's Crucifix from the altar of the Cappella degli Scrovegni, angels by Guariento from the Cappella della Reggia Carrarese, Madonna and Child by Boccaccio Boccaccino, Dinner at the House of Simon and a Crucifixion by Jacopo Tintoretto, and Saint Joseph and Child Jesus, Madonna, and Christ in the Garden by Giambattista Tiepolo. Other significant paintings include Titian's Birth of Adonis and Forest of Polidoro, Squarcione's Lazara Polyptych, and works by Pietro Della Vecchia, Bernardo Strozzi, Sebastiano Mazzoni, Valentin Lefevre, Luca Giordano, Giambattista Piazzetta, Pietro Longhi, Marco Ricci, Bartolomeo Pedon, François de Dijon, Bernardino Luini, Chiara Varotari, and Andrea Previtali. The Risorgimento Museum holds an original red shirt and a copy of Garibaldi's famous telegram 'Obbedisco'.

The museum complex is centered on the former convent of the Eremitani, an Augustinian foundation. The cloisters of the ex-convent were restored and fitted out between 1969 and 1986 according to the design of architects Franco Albini and Franca Helg. The complex incorporates the adjacent Cappella degli Scrovegni, renowned for its Giotto frescoes. The nearby Palazzo Zuckermann, facing the main complex, houses the Museum of Applied Arts and the Bottacin Museum. The Risorgimento Museum occupies the piano nobile of the historic Caffè Pedrocchi, a celebrated nineteenth-century coffee house.

The Civic Museums of Padua are located at Piazza Eremitani, at the edge of the historic center of Padua, in the Veneto region of Italy. The institution is municipally owned and operated. The website http://padovamusei.it/it provides further information. The complex's constituent parts, the Scrovegni Chapel, and associated sites such as the Caffè Pedrocchi location of the Risorgimento Museum, together form an integrated cultural destination within the city.