the region’s wealth
The city’s art heritage is showcased in the medieval convent of Sant’Agostino. One of the convent’s cloisters leads into the museum with a rich collection of superb polychrome wooden statues and glittering gold background paintings of the Sienese school that originally graced the many churches of the old diocese. The collection’s earliest works include the Atlantic Bible and a 12th century painted Crucifix formerly in the nearby Abbey of Sant’Antimo.
The building housing the Municipal Offices in Piazza Cavour, on the other hand, is home to Montalcino’s minor masterpiece of Renaissance art, the Chancery of the former Hospital of Santa Maria della Croce with its early 16th century frescoes by Vincenzo Tamagni, who worked with Raphael on the Logge in the Vatican. This small chamber’s longer walls are decorated with a series of heroines and famous men held up as models of virtue for the viewer’s edification, while trompe l’œil shelving with inkwells, ledgers and sheets of paper point to the chamber’s original function.
