Telling the story of a museum is difficult. One runs the risk of trivializing the complexity of the choices made upstream of what the visitor registers during a visit, and of pitching the account at the level, however important, of tourist publishing. Or else, and this is the other side of the coin, one traces an itinerary reserved for specialists alone.
In the case of the Cathedral Museum, a first and indispensable point of departure is the interweaving of the history of the place with the exhibition spaces, which are set within the ancient residential structures of the canons.
The first certain records of a community residing within the precincts of the Cathedral date back to 1036, the year of a document that settles and puts an end to a dispute between Bishop Andrea and Leone Bovo, praepositus of the Chapter.
The members of the fraternitas clericorum Perusinorum had adopted the Augustinian rule (certainly from the age of Clement III, as emerges from a bull of 1189), while the official end of this modus vivendi was sanctioned by a bull of Pope Julius II dated May 1, 1512.
The capitular institution would attend to every aspect of the life of the Cathedral and of its properties, among which must have been the living quarters used by the Canons.
The number of members making up the Chapter varied over the centuries, but it seems possible to recognize in the whole complex of buildings clustered around the two cloisters of San Lorenzo the insula sacra, that is, the clearly distinct and characterized block that still stands today as an autonomous architectural presence within the city’s acropolis.

The seat of the Museum thus tells of this important stratigraphy, in the staggering of its levels and in the coexistence, a short distance from one another, of early medieval structural elements (when not dating back to the Etruscan-Roman phase of occupation of the acropolis), of fifteenth-century vaulted spaces, of rooms belonging to the life of the old University. It houses the collections, formed of objects of different kinds, which include, besides paintings and sculptures, an important collection of manuscripts covering a chronological span from the sixth to the sixteenth century AD, as well as numerous objects of liturgical and devotional use, and finally, but no less important, a very rich collection of ancient textiles.
The oldest nucleus of works around which the Museo del Capitolo took shape was gathered by Canon Monsignor Luigi Rotelli (Corciano, July 26, 1833 – Rome, September 15, 1891), by express delegation and by the will of the capitular body.
Luigi Rotelli, who entered the Seminary in November 1841, soon became a Canon of the Cathedral and professor of Sacred Theology, and, though very young, was one of the closest collaborators of Gioacchino Pecci, bishop of Perugia from 1846, cardinal from 1857, and then pope under the name of Leo XIII from 1878.
In September 1871 his deep humanistic culture earned the young canon the task of “arranging the Cloister with drawings, marble slabs, busts and other artistic fragments found on our estates, and of carrying out other necessary restorations in the said loggia”[1], as the Capitular Acts report. These are the stone materials still largely visible in the upper Cloister of the Cathedral, with a few “absences” due to theft or to removal for reasons of conservation and study.
The artifacts that Monsignor Rotelli was charged with arranging differed widely in type, chronology and provenance: from the coats of arms of Perugian families, to decorative elements from the buildings of the Roman acropolis, to pieces from the altars dismantled in the cathedral over the centuries, as well as from churches in the city and its surroundings. As can be seen, the work was confined to stone materials alone, almost as if it were a matter of assigning a fitting place to stray artifacts.
The idea guiding our Canon in the arrangement of the pieces along the walls of the Cloister was not that of forming groups more or less homogeneous in type or chronology, but rather that of displaying and preserving artistic artifacts, and of enriching in the most suitable way the space beside the Cathedral.
We know the list of the pieces arranged by Rotelli thanks to the publication of a volume that went to press in 1911. The text was written by Monsignor Giuseppe Cernicchi [2], who died before he could publish it, and was edited by Don Ferdinando Morini in fulfillment of the author’s last wishes.

For most of the fragments the provenance is recorded: in numerous cases they formed parts of altars or of decorative ensembles removed from the Cathedral; what strikes us, however, is that many of them came from the Municipality (so it is indicated, without further detail), in one case even from the “Forte Paolino” – now the Rocca Paolina – and from other churches in the city, such as the basilica of San Domenico, which was then undergoing expropriation in the wake of the Pepoli edict.
Other pieces came from churches that had stood ab antiquo within the orbit of the Cathedral; last, but not least, a group of elements of classical (“Greek-Roman foliage”; “Roman head”) or Etruscan age is recorded, together with some Etruscan urns found on unspecified “lands belonging to the Chapter”.
Beyond the study of each individual piece, which is still in fieri, what we wish to stress is that at the close of the nineteenth century the Cathedral, and the Chapter that governed it, exercised a power of attraction, being entrusted with the preservation and display of part of the historical testimonies of the city.
For the sake of completeness, we note that in the cloister, again by the will of the Chapter and again through the care of Canon Rotelli, who composed its Latin text, was set into the wall the inscription recalling the celebration, in the period between 1216 and 1305, of five conclaves within the capitular spaces.
The work of recovery and conservation willed by the Chapter and overseen by Canon Rotelli at the close of the nineteenth century marks in fact the beginning of the history of what is now the Museo Capitolare, which would find full accomplishment some fifty years later, thanks to the work of Umberto Gnoli and of the “Brigata perugina degli amici dell’arte”.
Associations of this kind arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century and were formed with the twofold aim of contributing to the knowledge of the territory in which they proposed to operate and of safeguarding its artistic heritage, proposing and financing works of recovery and restoration through fund-raising.
As has been observed, the choice of the name “Brigata” signaled a climate of participation and sharing among “friends” with cultural interests, almost as if to ward off the risk of a fellowship of pedantic scholars.
In Perugia the “Brigata” was born in July 1909 from the project of a group of distinguished citizens of Perugia who wished to enhance, restore, defend and promote the historical and artistic heritage of the city through restorations, events and conferences.
The association’s activity was important for the birth of the Museum as well, since as early as 1912 it was deliberating on the possibility of asking the Chapter to set aside one of the rooms it owned as a Museum, gathering and exhibiting the most valuable artistic objects.
The Brigata’s request did not produce an immediate effect, but it had evidently helped to focus attention, including that of the Chapter, on the possibility of setting up a museum collection open to the visiting public.

At this point Umberto Gnoli enters the scene: he contributed decisively to the birth of the Museum, bringing a scholarly contribution of the highest profile to the knowledge of the materials. Umberto Gnoli (Rome, 1878 – Campello sul Clitunno, 1947) received his training in Spello, and the period he spent in the Umbrian town evidently brought him into contact with the Romanesque monuments of the area, on which he wrote his thesis under Adolfo Venturi.
The art of the Umbrian region was always at the center of his critical interests, thanks to which many attributions and artistic contexts were clarified. He also had occasion to frequent other important art historians. From 1910 he was Inspector of monuments for Umbria for the province of Perugia, and in this capacity he succeeded in having the city’s Pinacoteca Comunale, as it then was, transformed into the Regia Galleria Nazionale. It was during the years of his superintendency that the Museo del Capitolo was established, and it was Gnoli who also compiled its Catalogue.
The introduction to the Catalogue states that the Museum opened on the “recurrence of the fourth centenary of the death of Pietro Perugino” and that “to honor the memory of the greatest Umbrian painter the best form was to gather into an ordered and complete collection, and to make constantly visible to the public, the various distinguished works of art with which […] this illustrious basilica dedicated to San Lorenzo has been enriched”.
Thus our Museum too was born under the wing of the genius loci, of that Perugino whom Gnoli himself had helped to make known through the publication of documents and through his studies.
The newborn Museum gathered, quoting again from the introduction, what “came from suppressed churches or from donations or from modifications made to the decoration of the Cathedral”. Moreover, one could at last see what, because of its location, had never been offered to the public’s view: the explicit reference is to the altarpiece by Luca Signorelli, which could not be appreciated at its best “owing to the most unfortunate conditions of light and safety in which it found itself in the chapel of S. Onofrio, and to the modifications the Chapel itself has undergone over the centuries”.
The capitular collection would thus be supplemented by works coming not only from the Cathedral but also from outlying churches no longer attended by the communities of the territory. This passage shows that the museum institution was born with a vocation not limited to the conservation of the artifacts tied to the history of the Duomo, but devoted also to bearing witness to and preserving that connective tissue formed by the works probably less remarkable from a purely aesthetic point of view.
The rooms given over to the Museum were two: the so-called “Sala dei rinfreschi” (past the entrance, on the left), now serving as the visitors’ reception room and ticket office, and the so-called “treasury” room, on the right.
The objects on display were divided into two macro-categories, works of painting and codices in one room, liturgical furnishings and textiles in another, according to a criterion of idealist stamp, by which works of painting and illumination were to be “privileged” as the loftiest testimony of human genius. This criterion, which today would not be so unanimously accepted, answered moreover to the training and scholarly interests of Umberto Gnoli.
No labels were affixed to the works, nor captions; what was available instead was the small catalogue edited by Gnoli himself, still today the primary and irreplaceable instrument of knowledge for anyone concerned with the Museo Capitolare. Even now, in the present ticket-office room, a few tags bearing the numbers of the old arrangement of the works can be seen on the walls. The Museum was open every day at the request of visitors, who had to apply to the sacristy.
The 1923 catalogue closes with a note concerning the octagonal well-head that stood at the center of the Cloister: it was a gift from the Congregazione di Carità to the Municipality, which entrusted it to the custody of the Chapter. The original location of the piece, according to Gnoli, would have been a courtyard opposite the entrance of the old seat of the Hospital of S. Maria della Misericordia, in Via Oberdan.
With these characteristics the Museum remained open until the end of the 1980s, when the rooms were no longer practicable for the public and major works of structural consolidation and functional recovery became necessary.
The museum premises were thus considerably enlarged, while the new installation was overseen by the Soprintendenza per i Beni Ambientali e Architettonici in the years 1998–99, drawing also on funds for the Jubilee of 2000. On April 1 of that same year the Museum was opened to the public once more.

The last, but not least important, step was taken with the opening to the public of the archaeological itinerary, thanks to which visitors are led by Museum staff to discover or, better, rediscover a substantial part of the city.
The Museum now numbers twenty-three rooms, and the works are arranged according to a chronological criterion, following an ascending course.
The most recent significant operation on the display front was completed in 2011, when the principal parts of the decoration of the altar of the Pietà were reassembled: the work of the Florentine Renaissance sculptor Agostino di Antonio, known as Agostino di Duccio (Florence, 1418 – Perugia, after 1481).
The altar stood in the left aisle of the Cathedral and was made between 1473 and the following year thanks to the testamentary bequest of Niccolò Ranieri for the hospital of Santa Maria della Misericordia.
The marble slabs depicting Mary and Saint John the Evangelist were reused by Agostino, and the present installation also allows one to admire the face once hidden from view, with the medieval bas-reliefs that in all likelihood belonged to the portal of the Cathedral in its Romanesque phase.

Notes

[1] Archivio Capitolare di Perugia, Atti Capitolari, vol. XXVII (1871 – 1877), p. 33.

[2] G. Cernicchi, L’Acropoli sacra di Perugia e suoi archivi al principio del secolo XX, Perugia 1911, pp. 27 – 32

Chiara Basta has collaborated with the Soprintendenza ai Beni Storico Artistici of Milan and Brescia. Her research interests center on sculpture. She works at the Museo del Capitolo of the Cathedral of Perugia. She has numerous publications to her credit for Skira, Einaudi and Rizzoli.