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Messina in Sicilia - The Museum

The Messina Regional Museum preservers precious testimonies of the city's artistic production from over the centuries. Its collections include works both from the collections of the destroyed Museo Civico Peloritano, and from the religious and civic buildings destroyed by the catastrophic earthquake in 1908. The exhibits are arranged according in chronological order from the 12th to the 18th centuries, over 12 rooms on the ground floor and 3 display areas on the 1st floor, and include important architectural fragments, mosaics, sculpture and examples of decorative arts. The itinerary starts with material from the Norman period, a moment of great glory for the city, whose port represented a stopover point of great strategic importance on Mediterranean shipping routes. The exhibts here, like most of the works in the first rooms, show signs of the vast range of influences absorbed from a wide variety of contemporary national and international artistic currents. This shows the interest displayed in foreign work by those commissioning the pieces, many of which were indeed brought to Messina - along with artists themselves - from far afield: Venice, the Adriatic, Tuscany, Burgundy, Provence, Flanders, Spain and Portugal. This cultural background contributed to the formation of the great Antonello, who absorbed these experiences, reordered them and brought them together in a vision that was entirely Renaissance.

The modest figurative culture of Antonello's followers was supplanted, in the early 1500s, by the great Renaissance renewal, represented by G.Alibrandi and the Gagini family. These is turn were succeeded by the mannerist Polidoro and Montorsoli, who influenced local art for the whole of the century, up to the Counter-Reformation. This style of art was definitively swept away by the great event of the arrival of Caravaggio, destined to influence a great part of subsequent art. At the same time as the closest followers of Caravaggio, such as Rodriguez and Minniti, there was also a naturalist or classicist current represented by Maroli, Quagliata and Scilla. Interrupted only by the period of Spanish repression, this led up to Tuccari's 18th century Arcadianism, the moderately classical-style works of Tancredi and the advance of that lavish rococo which can be seen in the sumptous berlin of the Senate, a testimony of the city's glorious past. On the first floor there are numerous other artefacts in gold and silver, fabric, ivory, and majolica, which bear withnes to the lively creativity of the silversmiths and of local craftsmanship in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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