“Claudio Ridolfi” Civic Art Gallery

Corinaldo’s Civic Art Gallery opened to the public in 1996, is housed today in the former Augustinian monastery, where was moved in 2012 . The town art collection was for the most part constituted following the suspension of religious orders and subsequent confiscation of their valuables.

The Corinaldo art collection, due to its origins, has the connotation of a sacred Art Museum and includes not only numerous paintings with exclusively religious subjects, but also precious religious ornaments pertaining to the so-called “minor arts.” It is particularly worth mentioning the 18 marvelous sculpted and painted wooden shrines, a highly refined work by Sicilian carvers dating back to the early 1600s. These are displayed together with a beautiful processional cross in embossed silver dated 1615 from the ex Augustinian complex with many of the exhibited paintings. These are accompanied by altar paintings recovered by churches demolished over the course of the nineteenth century (Santa Maria di Piazza, San Rocco, San Pietro Apostolo) and, finally, canvases on loan from other Corinaldo churches (from the Addolorata and the church dedicated to the Saints Lorenzo and Ippolito in Villa Cesarini).

The gallery hosts works by Ercole Ramazzani, Giuseppe Bastiani, Claudio Ridolfi, Domenico Peruzzini, Giuseppe Marchesi and other artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Inside the museum, in addition to the sacred art collection, you can also find Nori de’ Nobili’s art collection, included in the entrance ticket. Nori’s sister decided to donate to Corinaldo and Trecastelli municipalities all the artworks Nori produced and this is how two different permanent exhibitions were created: in 2012 in Trecastelli was inaugurated a museum dedicated to the artist. Eleonora de’ Nobili, real name of Nori, was born in Pesaro on December the 16th, 1092 and spent her childhood between Pesaro and a huge mansion in Brugnetto di Ripe, called the “One hundred windows mansion”.
Her strong passion for figurative art lasted until her last years and her death in a psychiatric hospital in Modena on June the 2nd, 1968. Throughout her life, especially when she lived in Florence at the beginning of the XX century, she had the chance to know all the artistic styles of the moment and being inspired by them to create high quality art pieces.