Art Museums: Treasury Of The Basilica Of San Francesco And Perkins Coll

Housed in the Gothic hall in the Basilica of San Francesco, which now houses since 1977, the Treasure Museum has a rich artistic heritage that is gone for ever increasing. The first donations, marking the actual start of the collection, are related to the solemn transfer of the body of St. Francis from the parish of St. George the crypt of the Basilica. Among them, a gold cross with precious stones, which is said to have been donated by Pope Gregory IX, as well as many beautiful vestments, liturgical furnishings and decorative items.
Since 1986, the Treasure Museum is enriched by fifty-seven tables and a marble bas-relief donation of F. M. Perkins.
Currently, despite numerous disturbances and also depredations at the hands of Napoleon, the collection has many pieces, including: works of sacred gold (processional crosses, altar manuals, reliquaries), two Arab dossals red and yellow silk, unique in size and embroidery, eight Flemish tapestries, the frontal of Sixtus IV, the Parisian illuminated missal with the gospels of St. Louis IX, medieval glazed pottery, engraved plates from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, four preparatory drawings of Roman and Sienese masters of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.