Musei del Duomo - Modena

The Museums consist of two collections of the Lapidary Museum and the Cathedral Museum: while the latter is newly established, the original core of the Lapidary Museum dates back to the late nineteenth century, composed of sculptural artifacts found during the excavations and restorations the relevant Cathedral. These findings are increased over the years emerged as materials in the context of further excavations; since 1950 it is added to the collection also the metopes which originate in the foothills of the roof, which for conservation problems had been removed and replaced by copies. During the first half of the twentieth century the sculptures and reliefs undergo various displacements, receiving a more adequate accommodation until 1956, in a ground floor room overlooking the ancient cloister of the standard; in 1994 a new rearrangement that, following a thematic criterion is carried out, suggests the visitor who was to be the original location of the material. The collection includes sculptures and reliefs from the Roman era, used primarily as reused material for the construction of the Cathedral, fragments related to pre-existing early medieval cathedrals, Romanesque age relics, ancient inscriptions, medieval and modern. In the exhibition stand the Ark of San Geminiano, stone marble post a time in the sarcophagus of the saint protector, and the valuable series of metopes, consisting of eight sculptures of monsters and fantastic creatures made from an active teacher in Wiligelmo workshop.

The age-old need to find appropriate location to the liturgical furnishings of the cathedral and the treasure is answered with the establishment of the Cathedral Museum, which took place in 2000 to coincide with the Jubilee. Housed on the first floor of the same building that houses the Lapidary, the museum consists of a precious artistic and liturgical apparatus due to a period ranging from the Romanesque until the nineteenth century, including furniture, sculptures, textiles, paintings and codes, with which the Modenese community has over the centuries enriched the domus Clari Geminiani. Of exceptional historical and artistic value are the portable altar, a rare and wonderful example of the goldsmith's art of the XI-XII century, the sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries with stories of Genesis and, in the room reserved for the Archive codes Chapter, the Relatio, illuminated text the twelfth century that shows the record of the construction of the Cathedral.