San Matteo National Museum

General information

DestinationDurationCategory
Pisa, Italy1 hourAttractions/Entertainment

Program details

The National Museum of San Matteo is the most important museum of painting and sculpture in Pisa, located in the small square of San Matteo in Soarta and one of the most important museums in Europe on the subject of medieval art.
It possesses a complete set of works by the main masters from Pisa and more generally from Tuscany from the 12th to the 17th century, as well as archaeological and ceramic artifacts.

The history of the museum takes its start from the culture of antiquarian recovery alive in Pisa since the 18th century, which is identified with the first nucleus of paintings of "primitives" collected by the canon of the Cathedral Sebastiano Zucchetti (1796). The collection left in use for the School of Drawing, grew in the following century with other paintings and sculptures, also recovered through acquisitions to the state property made in the Napoleonic and post-unification periods, with the gradual confluence in the local Academy of Fine Arts.

It was not until 1893 that Iginio Benvenuto Supino set up the prestigious new Museo Civico at the convent of San Francesco, for which he also compiled a valuable catalog. Finally in 1949 the new National Museum was born, taking in the collections of the former Civic Museum with further additions and settling in the restored convent of St. Matthew in Soarta.

Of the former medieval monastery (11th century) today only some of the original structures are discernible, mainly in the interior rooms. In the mid-sixteenth century, at any rate, the monastery underwent alterations, as revealed by the date in the cloister, with Tuscan sandstone columns and capitals. To the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century probably dates the present entrance facade to the museum, facing the riverfront, of neoclassical inspiration.


€ 9,00 per person

Price includes:
Entry ticket to the museum

Price does not include:
Extras
Anything else not expressly described in the section "Price includes"