Palermo, restoration site open to public for Marsala's Flemish tapestries

Starting July 17, 2020, it will be possible to watch the restoration of the Flemish tapestries of Marsala every Friday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at theOratorio dei Bianchi in Palermo. It will be a worksite open to the public that will allow a close look at the stages of the intervention to the eight Flemish tapestries from the Mother Church of Marsala and dating back to the 16th century.

The masterpieces of textile art depict the war between the Romans and the Jews that took place in 66 A.D. and were made in Brussels, with the intention of asking Philip II for clemency toward the Dutch Calvinists, as the Romans long before had been with the Jews. According to one legend, England’s Queen Mary I Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII, found shelter during a storm in the port of Marsala and was hosted by Monsignor Antonino Lombardo, a man of culture and faith who soon became the queen’s confessor and cultural adviser. The tapestries were given as a token of thanks by the queen to Monsignor Lombardo, who in turn left them to the Mother Church with a prohibition against moving them to another place or dispersing them.

The tapestries were displayed for a long time in the apse of the church but forgotten. In the second half of the 20th century, restoration work was initiated, and only in the first half of the 1980s were the textile masterpieces placed in a small museum bordering the apse of the Mother Church.

The current open restoration is scheduled to be completed in about a year, and then the tapestries will be displayed in a new facility, namely in a space in the Marsala College church that will become the Museum of Tapestries and Textile Heritage of the Mother Church. The complex and slow intervention will be led by Giuseppe Ingui and a team composed of Giacomo Mirto, Sonia Caccamo and Lucilla De Angelis. “It is necessary today,” emphasized the regional councillor for Cultural Heritage, Alberto Samonà, “that highly specialized training schools capable of attracting masterpieces of art from all over the world to Sicily should be built on these skills with the prospect that Sicily can become a worldwide reference.”

The project also includes the completion of the restoration of the rooms and the setting up where the tapestries will be placed, and overall, between the restoration of the tapestries and the creation of the museum, it is expected to cost about three million euros.

Palermo, restoration site open to public for Marsala's Flemish tapestries

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.