National Pinacoteca of Bologna

Brief information

The National Pinacoteca of Bologna grew out of church paintings that had to change their purpose. The first exhibits came from the destroyed church of Santa Maria Maddalena; later, altar paintings and 13th-century Byzantine icons were transferred to the museum, and after 1796 works from local churches and monasteries arrived here. Therefore, this collection should be viewed not only as a sequence of paintings from Central Italy from the 13th to the 18th centuries, but also as displaced objects created for other spaces.

Since 1802, the Pinacoteca has been located at Via Belle Arti 56, in a building constructed for the Jesuit order. This fact changes the way one looks at the museum: its current role was superimposed on earlier religious architecture, rather than arising in a neutral exhibition box.

What to notice right away

It makes sense to connect three physical things: the former Jesuit building, the church of St. Ignatius within the museum's history, and the altar paintings themselves. The 1726 building provides the first layer: the Pinacoteca occupied a space created for the order of St. Ignatius. Then, in 1844, the exhibition was expanded into the church of St. Ignatius, and the painting on its vaults, "The Apotheosis of St. Ignatius," is especially important. It shows that the religious past here remained not only in the origin of the collection, but also in the very design of the space.

The paintings, too, are worth reading through their former place. Altar paintings and icons came from churches, monasteries, and a destroyed church. In the museum they look like works of art, but their format and themes remind us that at first they functioned as parts of a church interior.