The Raffaelli
Museum

Renato Raffaelli Museum in Gemona del Friuli preserves paintings and sculptures dating primarily from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Particularly important works included canvases by Swiss painter Melchior Widmar, who worked in Gemona in the second half of the seventeenth century, and an engraved and gilded Madonna of the Salzburg school (fifteenth century).

Renato Raffaelli Museum is named after Renato Raffaelli, a benefactor and supporter of cultural initiatives at the Franciscan monastery in Gemona. The exhibition opens with a canvas of “Saint Anthony and the Baby Jesus” by Gemona painter Giovanni Battista Tiani, alongside two works by unknown eighteenth-century painters, “Our Lady of Sorrows” and “Our Lady of Tears”.

Artworks contained in Gemona’s Renato Raffaelli Museum

The collection includes works by painters from Gemona, Friuli and the Veneto, as well as a number of painters from central and northern Italy. It also includes numerous canvases by Melchior Widmar, a Swiss painter who worked in Gemona in the second half of the seventeenth century. Noteworthy sculptures include a fifteenth-century "Mary and Child" or “Madonna Bella” carved in wood, painted and gilded, of the Salzburg school.

Madonna Bella – Raffaelli Gemona Museum

The museum also contains a collection of items from the Pinacoteca Antoniana which are no longer used in the liturgy and were already on exhibit prior to the 1976 earthquake. The Pinacoteca was opened in 1968 to conserve and display the Sanctuary’s artistic and historical heritage.

The Museum also contains works from the former Monastery of Sant’Anna di Capodistria, once a part of the Venetian Province of the Order of Franciscan Friars, dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. In addition to these works, the Museum preserves a number of canvases which originally belonged to the Monastery of the Sacred Heart in Feltre, left by the Franciscans in the last century and brought to Gemona.

THE TREASURES OF “RENATO RAFFAELLI” MUSEUM IN THE SANCTUARY OF SAINT ANTHONY IN GEMONA DEL FRIULI

Below the nave of the new Sanctuary is a great crypt containing a museum about engineer Renato Raffaelli, a distinguished benefactor of the Sanctuary. The museum preserves more than 100 artworks produced in Friuli and north of the Alps, including an outstanding fifteenth-century “Madonna Bella”, a Mary and Child sculpture of the Salzburg school. Brother Giovanni guides us in discovery of these treasures.