Exhibition
The Museo Diocesano presents fifteenth-century frescoes from the monastery of Santa Chiara in Milan, from the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, UBI Banca collection. The initiative, a precious starting point for reflection on the themes of Holy Easter, presents the eleven surviving frescoes of the cycle dedicated to the Stories of the Passion, never before exhibited to the public, with a proposal for the reconstruction of the entire cycle as well as with a hypothesis on the original location inside the cloistered church. This is a first working hypothesis, on which studies are still underway, in collaboration with the Superintendency for Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the metropolitan city of Milan.
In Lombardy in the second half of the 15th century the churches of the Minor Observants, initially bare in adherence to the principle of poverty, were enriched with cycles dedicated to scenes of the Passion, generally placed in the upper part of the partition, i.e. the vertical structure that divided the internal space of the place of worship between the side dedicated to the faithful and the one intended for the religious. Studies have highlighted that, unlike other Observant Franciscan churches, the frescoes, removed in 1881, were not originally located on the external side of the partition facing the people, but on the internal one, therefore visible only to the nuns. As also documented for other contemporary cycles, in this case too many masters worked at the same time with their respective workshops.
Also on display are two other frescoes depicting Saint Clare with the Virgins and the Madonna and Child with Angels, again from the same monastic complex.
The three stone reliefs with Saint Francis, Christ in Pietà and Saint Clare come from the same place, forming part of the permanent collection of the Museo Diocesano and visible in the underground room (storage of the Intesa collection Sanpaolo, UBI Banca collection), which constituted the keystones of the church.
