Despite the intermittent closures and openings due to the health emergency, in Vercelli there exists a small museum that has not stopped. With a dual vocation, secular and religious, the Museum of the Treasure of the Cathedral has continued to tell the story of Vercelli, even during the pandemic, and has worked to enhance this narrative with some new features, now available for researchers, visitors, and students.
Managed by the Foundation Museum of the Treasure of the Cathedral and Chapter Archive, the exhibition path narrates part of the history of the Archdiocese of Vercelli, which spans millennia, and is inextricably linked to the patron saint Eusebius, the first bishop of the city and of Piedmont.
During the months of the health emergency, the Foundation worked on two fronts: the virtual world, with stories from home via social media Facebook and Instagram, the launch on Google Arts & Culture, and the creation of a video game soon to be released; and the real world, by developing and advancing projects in anticipation of reopening.
The latest addition: the Bishops’ Cabinet. A bricked-up door, within a poppy red room, has initiated the creation of a new exhibition section of the Museum. Already on the Foundation’s wishlist for some time and the subject of studies, the new exhibition area has materialized thanks to the fundamental contribution of the Lions Club of Vercelli, which wanted to send a tangible signal of restart through culture.
What is displayed in a wall cabinet? Accessories: gloves from the chirotheca, shoes with significant trimmings, rings, and pectoral crosses worn by bishops of the 19th and 20th centuries. Fashionable items of the times that actually refer to symbols, rituals, and episcopal insignia, as well as the solemn celebrations that took place at the Cathedral of Vercelli.
In the same room, conventionally defined as one of the Pope’s Rooms, the vestment of Pope Julius II, known as Giuliano della Rovere, bishop of Vercelli at the beginning of the 16th century, has been relocated. Della Rovere never passed through the city, given the brevity of his term and his political and diplomatic affairs, but he sent to Vercelli a chasuble and a typically Renaissance cope, with gold-thread embroidery and elaborate decorative elements that refer to a Venetian manufacture cooperating with a Flemish-Burgundian one.
In perfect dialogue, the vestment speaks with other works of the Renaissance: a panel with The Adoration of the Magi by Gerolamo Giovenone (1515) and a Tapestry with the Baptism of Christ (first half of the 16th century), where the fabrics depicted in the works narrate the paintings in thread and vice versa. But what was there beyond the technique, the sparkle of gold in threads, and the solemnity of the vestments? The intimate moment of the bishops’ vesting, who, aware of their role, proudly donned the insignia belonging to them, sometimes received directly from the hands of the Pope.
Thus, a new narrative from the Foundation begins to take shape, dotted with the stories of great figures, known even outside the Vercelli circle: Alessandro D’Angennes, Carlo Lorenzo Pampirio, Giovanni Gamberoni and Giacomo Montanelli. Stories of bishops, archbishops, popes, with an eye on the fashion of the time, exploring objects that transition from the intimate and private sphere to the public during celebrations.
