The Museum of the Madonna del Parto, just outside the walls of the village of Monterchi, is a museum for a single work, the masterpiece by Piero della Francesca, probably created towards the mid-fifteenth century for the small church of Momentana, now a cemetery chapel.
It depicts the Virgin in an evident state of pregnancy with her hand on her belly in a very natural gesture that blends with the royalty of the entire composition. The angels open the tent, the tabernaculum, which contains Mary, which in turn is the tabernacle of the body of Christ.
The hypothesis that it was painted following the death of the painter's mother, originally from Monterchi, is suggestive but unlikely.
The Museum also displays the Madonna del Latte, dating back to the 14th century, which was located under the fresco by Piero della Francesca. After the Council of Trent, the altar of the Madonna del Parto was no longer officiated, probably because the subject was no longer considered decorous, and the masterpiece was thus rediscovered only at the end of the nineteenth century.
It was so venerated by the inhabitants of Monterchi that, for fear that someone might take it away, they chased away both the restorer Domenico Fiscali, in charge of restoring it after the 1917 earthquake, and the art historians Ugo Procacci and Mario Salmi, who intended to put it safe from the bombings of the Second World War.
In addition to the Madonna del Parto Museum in Monterchi it is also possible to visit the Scale Museum.
Open to the public since June 2012 and set up in the rooms of the sixteenth-century Palazzo Massi-Alberti, it was born from the private collection of Velio Ortolani, one of the most important of its kind in Europe. Inside this Museum it is possible to retrace over six centuries of the history of all types of scales, starting from the elegant steelyards and two-arm scales of the 15th century up to more modern instruments, such as laboratory scales and market scales. dating back to the last century.
Translated by Google •
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