Regional museum of Messina

About

The Museo Interdisciplinare Regionale (MuMe). or Regional Museum of Messina (Italian - Museo regionale interdisciplinare di Messina), is an art museum located on the northern coast of the city of Messina, Sicily, Italy. MuMe illustrates the development of art and culture in Messina from the 12th to the 18th centuries, with outstanding figures such as the renowned artists Andrea della Robbia, Antonello da Messina, Girolamo Alibrandi, Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), and Polidoro da Caravaggio. Until 2017 it was housed in the former Barbera-Mellinghoff silk-mill, a late 19th-century building chosen for it after the 1908 Messina earthquake. Since 2017 it has been housed in a nearby complex designed in the 1970s.

The building housing the museum was originally the Barbera-Mellinghoff spinning-mill, a late 19th-century construction chosen after the great earthquake of 1908 to be the site of the future museum, which was refurbished and finally opened in 1922. Over the years the building has been considerably restructured in order to guarantee the exhibits the best possible conditions for their preservation; the last major work was carried out in the 1980s. A new large complex of buildings near the present site was completed in 2010s.

The original collections came from the Museo Civico. After the earthquake in 1908 these were expanded by the addition of paintings, sculptures and precious decorative works from damaged or destroyed buildings, thus creating a collection of paintings and sculptures by internationally known and local artists, together with a variety of other objets d'art.

The museum was organized on historicistic principles: each area contains the most important works of the same period, regardless of their typological class.

- Rooms 1-2 works of the Norman-Swabian period

- Rooms 3-4 sculptures and paintings of the 15th and 16th century

- Room 4 "Saint Gregory Polyptych" by Antonello da Messina

- Rooms 5-8 Paintings, sculptures, funerary monuments and works of decorative art of the 16th century

- Rooms 9-11 17th-century art and culture

- Room 12 18th-century art and culture in Messina

- Room 13 "The treasury" silversmithry, cribs, church ornaments, pottery

The first nucleus for the museum's collection came with various private collections of conservative taste. First opened in 1806 as the Museo civico peloritano by the Reale Accademia Peloritana "to end the despoliation of art", its formation was the idea of its first director Carmelo La Farina. It housed the Alojsio, Arenaprimo, Ciancialo, Grosso-Cacopardo and Carmisino family collections as well as a collection of 14th- to 18th-century paintings owned by the city's senate, which also part-funded its running costs.

It was initially based on via Rovere, near the Archivio degli atti notarili, before being moved to former university buildings, then (after its massive expansion from the collections of religious corporations suppressed by the 1866 liquidation laws) in 1884 to a building on via Peculio Frumentario and from 1891 to 1908 to the former monastery of San Gregorio.

In the rooms of the former monastery, following acquisitions and hereditary legacies, a copious amount of heterogeneous materials will be formed and sedimented: in addition to the movables and objects of cultural use, coming from the ecclesiastical heritage, and the oil paintings from various eras and schools, also a rich numismatic collection, typologically classified into Mamertine, Greek and Roman Republican coins from the 2nd to the 1st century, mostly coming from the collection of Grosso-Cacopardo and his heirs purchased and donated to the Museum by the Municipality of Messina.

Also noteworthy are: the collection of seventy-four enamelled maiolica vases with reliefs – made between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the following century, by the factories of Urbino, Casteldurante and Faenza – coming from the pharmacy of the civic hospital of Messina, a collection of arms, the complete collection of the Gazzetta Britannica, a newspaper from the time of Joachim Murat, various manuscripts, five Latin codices probably coming from the Benedictine Library destroyed in 1848 and, finally, a large number of engravings by Alojsio Iuvara, by Raimondi, parchments from 1200 to 1500, sarcophagi and marble sculptures from various periods.

This necessarily incomplete list of the collections contained in the Civic Museum, in addition to being justified by the loss of much material in the 1908 earthquake, also tends to underline what is peculiar to most post-unification Italian civic museums, that is, their functional specificity as places of storage and collection with essentially protective and representative purposes.

The need for a more organic and scientific organization of the material emerged in the founding act of a municipal commission that met in 1890. This commission, which included Arenaprimo and Antonio Picciotto, the future director of the museum, among its members, drafted an initial report that same year, outlining the criteria adopted for the organization of the art gallery.

After considering the aesthetic value and the notable quantity of paintings from the Messina school, the report highlights the need for "this school to be represented with all its characteristic features and in its entirety in its development, gathering all the elements that are useful in revealing its artists, whether fellow citizens or foreigners, and in all its periods of splendor and decadence." Since it would be deplorable "if the Messina art gallery were to be proud only for the panels of the famous school of the Antonimi," it is necessary that "alongside the works of those greats, for reasons of art and history, there must be those of the mediocre, of those who suffered from their lack of talent, or who, while giving proof of it, were always overwhelmed by the bad taste of the era."

It is highly significant that, along with these exhibition criteria – which not only concern paintings of greater aesthetic value, but also take into account works classified as mediocre or from historical periods considered decadent (such as, for example, the Baroque taste of the 17th century) – the document highlights the educational and cultural function of the museum which "rather than focusing on curiosity with continuous links to teaching, must return to true educational utility, offering us, through monuments, paintings, and utensils, a complete and genuine image of the culture, art, and life of previous centuries." Selective criteria, however, resurface in the evaluation of contemporary art and genre painting. The former should be displayed "distinct and segregated," the latter so that it "forms a separate section."

Thus the suspicion resurfaces that the very display of works considered minor, a criterion in itself very noble, rather than deference to the historical rigor of documentation and respect for the work of art itself, hides with intellectualistic subtlety 19th century, the less noble intent, of making the " major works " stand out more; proof of this is that for the masterpieces " a so-called hall of honor will be established", a privilege and prerogative that still, in some museums, tend to separate and distinguish the excellent works.