Introduction

The Merician Museum is located in the sixteenth-century room of the Lateran Canons, probably once used as a refectory, and later as a sacristy attached to the Church of St. Afra in St. Angela's day. It was installed in 1999, primarily according to the remembrances of the Company, in order to provide for visitors a documentary walk through the life of the saint.

It is not treated as a museum in the strict sense of the word, since it contains only a small part of the works of art related to Angela Merici, which are scattered throughout the province of Brescia, Italy, and the whole world. Here one finds no objects from Angela's daily life, which was both humble and sublime. Nothing of this remains. Of the little she left at her death, nothing has survived for us, not the prayerbook nor the rosary given to her sisters, not the discipline nor the hairshirt saved until 1810, which have disappeared since then.

What remains from her is her message of faith and charity, perpetuated in the practice of her Daughters, and the devotion of her people, witnessed in these places.

The works are arranged on panels, numbered in sequence beginning to the left of the entrance, and organized in chronological order. Paintings hung on the wall are described as they are encountered in the course of the visit.

In the showcases at the center of the room are gathered the relics related to Elisabetta and Maddalena Girelli, the Daughters of Saint Angela who reconstituted the Company in 1866. Several of the most ancient books devoted to Angela Merici are on display.

INDEX

To the right of the entrance, on the wall, we find a copy of a painting from the seventeenth century. It represents Saint Angela, as do many other portraits executed after her death, with the authentic traits of her face, visible after 1580 as a result of the public display of her body. The gray habit and the veil in which she appears in this painting resemble those of the Secular Franciscans, in which she wished to be buried.

On the first panel we see an oil painting from the end of the nineteenth century, oval-shaped, representing Angela kneeling in prayer before the crucifix, receiving divine illumination at the origin of her call.

To the side, we find the reproduction of a page from Mattia Bellentano which, in the metaphorical style typical of the period when it was written, informs us about the vocation of the future saint. It then tells her birthplace, Desenzano; the name of her father's family, Merici; and her mother's, Biancosi.

The subtitle at the bottom of the panel reports a phrase drawn from the biography which Bernardo Faino wrote a century after her death. He was one of the first biographers of Angela Merici.

The indicated date of her birth, 1474, commonly accepted, is not historically certain. The choice of her baptismal name, Angela, responds to a divine inspiration about the future foundress of an «Angelic Company».

INDEX

A page from Faino describes the town of Desenzano, on Lake Garda, located in an area favored by nature.

Angela has been the patron saint of this large village since 1962, despite the fact that the privilege of being her birthplace is also claimed by the neighboring town of Salò.

The seventeenth-century engraving represents the territory of Brescia. At the time of Angela Merici's birth, it was one of the richest domains of the Republic of Venice and included the zone around Lake Garda, but dependent on the curia of Verona.

Angela grew up in a family of modest social standing, though related to people who were influential, and deeply rooted in Christian principles. Her father, Giovanni, made a living by working the land. She had a sister and some brothers.

In adolescence she lost her sister and both parents. Exposed to the dangers of those turbulent years, she found a welcome in the home of a well-off maternal uncle in Salò, a home visited by refined and cultured people. She learned to read. For writing, she was always to make use of secretaries.

Her spirituality was enriched by regular visits to a local Franciscan convent, which influenced her entrance into the Third Order. Angela Merici's religious spirit would always be marked by the character of the saint of Assisi, such as the integrity of faith and obedience to the Church, the mission of peace and a life of penance, of poverty, and of charity.

In the eighteenth-century engraving, the duchy of Milan and the diocese of Brescia are represented. During the sixteenth century, Milan and Venice were disputing over the city and the province, which passed several times from the control of one to the other.

Above we find a copy of a manuscript page from the first biography of Angela, written by Giovan Battista Nazari.

INDEX

The extract from Nazari gives information about her family, the religious education which her father transmitted to her by reading from the sacred texts, about her prayer and the penance to which she submitted herself from the time of her childhood, and about the decisive influence of her beloved sister's premature death.

Next to is, we find a page where two extracts are reproduced. The first, also from Nazari, tells us about the famous apparition in which Angela saw her sister in glory amid a procession of angels. The second, from Pietro Bagatta, written two centuries later, reports what tradition relates about this vision.

An oval painting by an unknown artist, from the beginning the twentieth century, portrays the young Angela dressed as a country girl. In a field blooming with lilies, she sees a procession of angels and maidens.

It is said, in fact, that at Le Grezze, the area of Desenzano where the Mericis' little house and farm are located, the saint had a heavenly vision which prefigured the future creation of the Company. The biographers speak often of it and, despite some differences, they agree on the figurative elements which appear in this painting; the authenticity was recognized in the process of canonization in 1807: the rural setting, the noon hour, the procession of angels, the apparition of her sister.

Cozzano, however, faithful secretary and witness to Angela Merici's words, cites none of these details, limiting himself to speaking of a divine intervention, a supernatural illumination, a call to a mission which was not merely human.

According to the tradition, it would be possible that she may have had two visions, and in the second it may have been indicated where the mission should be realized, identifiable as Brescia.

The banner exhibited on the side, made in the 20th century, reproduces the episode of the adjacent painting. The repetition of the figurative scheme and the details witness to the force of the tradition.

Under the banner there is another extract drawn from Nazari's biography in which are developed the reasons which brought Angela to the destined place, after a return to her paternal home. In 1516, the Franciscans of Salò sent Angela Merici to Brescia to console a noble widow, Caterina Patengola, whose two children had died, perhaps during the tragic warfare of the preceding years.

INDEX

The nineteenth-century painting on canvas displayed here shows Angela Merici in the habit of a Franciscan tertiary.

So she must have appeared to the merchant Antonio Romano, as he affirmed in his testimony of 1568, reported under the portrait, saying that he met her while she was staying with the Patengolas, a Mother Sister Angela of Desenzano, a woman consecrated in the Third Order of the Friars Minor. After several months, when her words had succeeded in bringing peace to the heart of Caterina, Angela Merici welcomed Antonio's offer to move into a lodging which belonged to him.

The perspective map of Brescia can give an idea of what became for Angela Aher city.

The two pages reproduced below describe the particular prosperity of the Brescian territory, toward the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, strengthened by the strong demographic growth which developed there. Such favorable conditions came to an end with the pillage, the carnage carried out in 1512 by mercenaries in the pay of the French army, who incurred the blame of all Europe for their cruelty in the "Sack". The 10,000 dead of those days were not the end of the violence, the proscriptions, the condemnations. In four successive years, the city passed three times from side to side. Then in 1517 the Venetians, having conquered the Spanish, regained possession. In this turbulent climate, Angela arrived in Brescia.

However, the city regained its vigor and wealth only three years after the return of the Serenissima and eight years after those terrible events, as Pietro Tron, Brescia's mayor, affirms in his report to the Senate of the Venetian Republic, transcribed here. He concludes by saying that in the "Magnificent City" it did not seem as though it had ever been sacked.

INDEX

The two churchmen whose portraits are reproduced here are Paolo Zane and Francesco Cornaro, Venetians who succeeded one another in the episcopacy of Brescia during the years when Angela Merici lived there.

The accompanying extract speaks of the arrival of Cardinal Cornaro with a splendid procession in 1532. The spiritual situation of Brescia during the first part of the sixteenth century could not have been more contradictory. On the one hand, the secular clergy withdrew from pastoral responsibilities and lived in a moral laxity which the conventual clergy shared. It was made more severe by the phenomenon of forced monastic Avocations. On the other hand, some religious orders such as the Servites of Mary, the Dominicans, and the Benedictines were mobilizing to counteract the pagan culture and the spreading Lutheranism.

Among their representatives were persons of the highest quality, like Jerome Emilian, who opened the first Oratory for men in Brescia and would found the Somaschan Order, and Father Francesco Cabrini, represented in the third portrait.

Cabrini reorganized the Company of the Fathers of Peace, compiling in 1563 his "First Constitution" of which we reproduce the beginning. Besides the post-Tridentine style, we can recognize in this text several traits typical of Merician spirituality.

Also active in the city were the Theatines, a congregation founded by Gaetano of Thiene, and the Lateran Canons, who resided in the building connected with the Church of St. Afra, now the Sanctuary of St. Angela. The room in which we find ourselves was probably their dining room, as has already been said.

Both were linked to the noble Bartolomeo Stella, who in 1521 founded in Brescia the Hospital for the Incurables (initially people suffering from syphilis, then people with serious diseases in general). These places were being created in these years in various Italian cities by elite lay persons, men and women connected with the Company of Divine Love, leading intensely religious and charitable lives. The secrecy of the association, born in Genoa at the end of the fifteenth century, makes it impossible for us to know the names of the members, but it is certain that Stella belonged to it.

After the Sack, the countess Laura Gambara and the young widow Elisabetta Prato, who were working at the hospital, decided to attend to the numerous surviving women victimized by the brutality of the soldiers, by contagion, by destitution. The strong personal bonds and the spiritual similarities between Angela Merici and these groups of humanitarians make one think that, in this charitable fervor, she had a major role. A collaborator of Stella, Giacomo Chizzola, would later become a "protector" of St. Angela's Company.

The best-known among Angela's friends was Agostino Gallo, seen in the engraved portrait. He was a humanist and agricultural expert, author of a best-seller of the time, published in 1564. The Ten Days of True Agriculture, and the Pleasures of Rural Life exalts rural life in contrast with business and the military. A collaborator of St. Jerome Emilian and of Stella, he knew Angela thanks to his sister Ippolita, who had become a Franciscan tertiary after her husband's death.

In the report here, he testified that he was in his thirties when their friendship intensified. In 1529, with his friend Girolamo Patengola, he invited her to leave Brescia, which was threatened with siege by Charles V, and to take refuge in Cremona. On her return, Angela lived in the Gallo house for two years, and he accompanied her, in 1532, on her second pilgrimage to Varallo. Agostino was to furnish these and many other very precious details to Nazari, author of the first biography of the saint.

INDEX

Having left the Patengola household, Angela lived for fourteen years in a house owned by Romano, near the Church of Saint Agatha, where she could go to church often and receive the sacraments, as her situation as a tertiary prescribed, and make her own contribution of ideas and charity to everyone around her.

Angela Merici also became an influential and tender mother of numerous spiritual children, mostly humble, unfortunate, and needy ones, but also notable people seeking advice. Her reputation for holiness and wisdom attracted Francesco Sforza, who struck up with her an intense and lasting rapport. Many religious also found in this unlettered women a particular wisdom in interpreting sacred texts. Around Angela, in ever-growing numbers, gathered noble women and women of the people, seeking her help and wanting to collaborate with her in assisting other women.

Angela Merici left the city only in response to her deep need for spiritual resources. Her first trip was to Mantua, where she went to venerate the tomb of the Blessed Osanna Andreasi, sometime between 1517 and 1524.

In 1524, with her faithful friend Antonio Romano, she made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The two engravings here show us the territory of Palestine and the city of Jerusalem.

Angela went to Venice to embark. On the way, a malady, surely a divine sign, deprived her completely of her sight and obliged her to see the places of Jesus life solely through the eyes of her soul. Next came the adventures of the return voyage, with a tragic storm, an attack by pirates and danger from the Turks; finally the return to Venice, where her reputation occasioned an invitation to stay there. But the mission which awaited her compelled her to return as soon as possible to Brescia.

In the engraving below, we see a map of Rome, where Angela Merici made a pilgrimage in 1525, on the occasion of the Jubilee, eager to visit the relics of the early martyrs.

Pope Clement VII, who had heard of her virtue, received her. But the possibility that he might invite her to remain in Rome made Angela hasten her return to her own city.

Some eyewitness accounts drawn from Nazari's biography are reported on the page seen here. It refers to three of the four pilgrimages made by the saint.

To the right of the sixth panel, before the window, we find a large eighteenth-century painting by Guiseppe Fali. Angela appears in an unusual role for a woman of that time, but essential in Merician spirituality, that of a pilgrim. The image renders an accurate account. The countryside represented is that of Crete. There, according to tradition, during the return voyage from Palestine, Angela Merici recovered her sight before a crucifix. The saint was later to be buried with her traveling staff.

To the right of the large window, a pastel on paper by Pietro Calzavacca, in a large format, shows Angela as mother and teacher. She is portrayed with a book on her lap, in the process of teaching a prayer to a little girl standing close to her side, with hands joined. As in many other images, she wears a habit similar to that of the Ursulines in the conventual religious Order which took its inspiration from her Rule and her pedagogic message.

By creating a company of virgins who lived their consecration in the world without separation or outer signs differentiating or distinguishing them from other women, Angela Merici was a creative precursor of recent ecclesial developments. Motherhood and teaching are complementary expressions, characteristic of Angela Merici's spirituality. These themes surely developed initially in a religious sense but turned also to the promotion of women in general.

For the Mother it was certainly not possible to ignore the subordination which afflicted a woman in her time, kept under the guardianship of a father, a husband, or a convent. Outside the roles of daughter, wife, or nun, a woman was deprived of any social dignity. For women unwilling or unable to enter a convent, Angela boldly undertook to create a structure which allowed them a life consecrated to God while remaining in the world as she herself had done. She conceived this as so open and flexible that it could be adapted to the needs of all times and all places.

The Teacher developed for her daughters and for young girls in general an absolutely revolutionary pedagogy, in affirming that education, understood as a service of love, must be kindly and gentle and must take into account material needs.

INDEX

From Brescia, where it was feared that the barbarities of 1512 were about to be repeated, Angela was forced to depart in 1529 for Cremona, to join Girolamo Patengola and the Gallo family, who had a house there. During this period, because of a serious illness, she was at death's door, but she inexplicably recovered. The same year, she made a pilgrimage to the Holy Mount of Varallo in the province of Vercelli, the "new Jerusalem" where she relived with deep feeling the experiences of her trip to the Holy Land.

On returning from Cremona, Angela Merici lived in the home of Agostino Gallo, in the lane of San Clemente. But after several months, in 1530 she established herself first near Saint Barnabas, and then, with Barbara Fontana, in a small room connected with the church of Saint Afra. There she could more freely receive her disciples.

Simona, Laura, Peregrina, Clara, and Barbara began to gather in the oratory on the cathedral square put at the group's disposal by Elisabetta Prato. According to the biographers, a second pilgrimage to Varallo, in 1532, became the prelude to the foundation of the Company, if, as it seems, the participants were those who would become the first daughters of Angela.

In 1533, nearly sixty, Angela Merici had the oratory decorated with frescoes - later destroyed with the house -" in which appeared images which incarnate her Christian ideals: the Crucified Christ with an angelic court that weeps for his death; the mysteries of the life of Jesus and Mary; Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, who dedicated herself to the poor and the sick; the patron saints of Brescia; and early Christian virgins, among them Ursula.

In 1535, while preparing her twenty-eight followers to become part of the Company, Angela composed the Rule. On November 25, the eleventh anniversary of her return from the Holy Land, probably at the Church of Saint Afra, after Mass, the ceremony took place in which the writing of each Daughter's name in the Book of the Company constituted a ratification of the choice made happily and of her own will.

The seventh panel displays an oil painting on canvas by Calzavacca, representing Catherine of Alexandria, the saint whose feast day is on November 25.

INDEX

In the statement reported here, the Second General Book affirms that Angela chose this day for founding her Company also because it celebrates Saint Catherine, as she intended to propose that saint as a model for the members. The founding of the Company is almost certainly the point of this canvas by a great Brescian painter of the sixteenth century, Girolamo Romanino. On account of its historic and artistic importance, we reproduce it here, on the apposite page, even though it is not found in our museum, but in one in Memphis, USA. It can be dated to 1535 or a little bit later. Saint Catherine is shown on her knees, receiving a nuptial ring from the child Jesus, who is on the Madonna's lap. Also seen are Saint Lawrence and Saint Ursula (right) with a standard displaying a red cross. At the far right is Angela, kneeling, with hands folded, dressed as a Franciscan tertiary. In the background haze is Brescia with its castle. To one who has looked at Moretto's death-portrait of Angela Merici (about which we will say more later), she is easily recognizable by her nose and her pronounced lower lip.

The bronze bas-relief by Ettore Calvelli, from 1974, represents the foundress with the first virgins of the Company.

Here is the decree of the formal establishment of the Company, which took place in 1536 with the approval of the Rule by Lorenzo Muzio, vicar of Brescia's bishop.

In 1537, officers of the Company were elected, according to the notarized record. In it Angela is recognized as Mother, minister and treasurer; four virgins are designated teachers for the others; four widows are named to be Athe mothers' of the virgins; four men are indicated as agents and Afathers. This document gives useful information about the number of members (seventy-six), and their very different social positions. It allows us to understand that Angela Merici made choices with great realism, aware of the need to furnish her daughters, in their low social position, with the support of influential people.

In the small engraving hanging below, we see Ursula, a saint of capital importance for Merician spirituality, recognizable by the arrows and by the martyr's palm that she holds in her hand.

INDEX

The Company had as its namesake Saint Ursula, represented in this nineteenth-century painting. From childhood Angela probably knew about this martyr, widely venerated at the time, and she certainly admired Carpaccio's and Moretto's splendid paintings depicting her. According to the tradition, Ursula, a British princess promised to a pagan in marriage, chooses virginity and goes on pilgrimage to Rome with eleven thousand virgins to venerate the relics of the martyrs; having returned to Cologne, in order to remain faithful to Christ she submits to martyrdom, leading her companions, who are killed with her by the arrows of the Huns. Beyond the fictional aspects, this saint represented for Angela the womanly ideal which she wished to propose to her daughters, uniting in herself contemplation and action, consecration and apostolate.

In 1539, when the number of her daughters had reached 150, Angela sensed that her end was coming, and she dictated to her faithful confidante Gabriel Cozzano the Counsels for the "Colonelle" (the leaders) and the Testament for the Lady Governors (the matrons), two texts with which she took leave of her sisters, recommending charity and concord and expressing her joy, her consolation, and her gratitude. These two texts, along with the Rule, constitute a small masterpiece of spirituality and of pedagogy.

On the right, we can see the authentic portrait of the saint, painted by Moretto, probably on the invitation of her friend Gallo. Moretto was the greatest representative of the prestigious Renaissance pictorial school in Brescia. Creation of the portrait was made possible by the prolonged exposition of the body after her death. It is an extremely realistic work. It seems that the painter wanted to fix on the canvas only the physical traits of Angela's face. He foregoes all idealization, entrusting the expression of the sublime to the raw reality of death.

INDEX

On the page fastened in the lower part of the panel are reported some testimonies about Angela Merici's death on January 27, 1540. The saint's life ended in her sixty-sixth year, serenely and in the desire for union with God, after an unknown illness, during which innumerable visitors rushed to her room. She never ceased urging them to goodness.

Her body was carried into the crypt of the Church of Saint Afra and during that brief journey received honors which usually come to the great personages of history. There, her mortal remains stayed incorrupt for thirty days. Burial was delayed by a dispute between the clergy of Saint Afra and of the cathedral. (The oratory, center of the Company, was located in the cathedral district.) Finally Angela was buried in the crypt where she had been laid out.

In 1568 an interview process was opened in view of a future beatification. An initial questioning of four witnesses who had known the saint took place. Nazari, who gave his name to the Aprocess, composed her first biography based on this testimony.

In 1580, after the sepulchre was opened, the body, hardly decomposed, was placed in a crystal container, which was replaced by others, each more precious than the last, up to the present one, in 1907.

The engraving affixed here represents one of the glass sarcophagi in which Angela Merici's body was placed.

In 1580 Charles Borromeo promised to open the cause of beatification, but he died before carrying out his initiative.

Two centuries after her death, an Ursuline nun of Rome took up the role of postulator of the cause of Angela Merici's beatification. The decree approving her cult and recognizing the title of "Blessed" was issued April 30, 1768, by Clement XIII. On May 24, 1807, Pius VII proclaimed her ASaint. In 1861, Pius IX extended her cult to the universal Church.

The following engraving portrays the proclamation of Angela's sainthood.

INDEX

On this panel we find a piece of embroidery in an oval shape, probably done by a Daughter. The figure of Saint Ursula, the patron, holds in her hand a standard decorated with a red cross; Saint Angela kneels before her.

The banner suspended at the side depicts again the same persons, in an identical scheme.

The page below the oval, drawn from a work of Doneda from 1768, the year of Angela's beatification, describes the figure of Ursula and confirms her function as a model for the Company of virgins named for her.

INDEX

On this panel we find a painting on canvas, attributed to Domenico Caretti, representing Angela at an advanced age, but with a younger appearance than in many realistic images. Nonetheless, her knotted hands suggest the traces left on her by a penitential life. She slept in effect on the ground, on a straw pallet; she nourished herself with vegetables and fruits; she ate bread no more than twice a week and she fasted for long periods. This unsigned and undated work can be grouped with Brescian paintings of the early eighteenth century. It was executed before the beatification, as the figure has no halo, although she is surrounded with rays of light. Angela was clearly venerated before the canonization.

INDEX

Portraits of the Blessed Maddalena and Elisabetta Girelli are hung here. In 1866, with fifty-eight companions, they brought the Company back to life after the suppression (by Napoleon) in 1810, as the pages below explain.

Accompanying them are a portrait of Father Giuseppe Chiarini, who supported the Girelli sisters in their work, and some writings concerning him.

Close by are some writings of the Girelli sisters and of Father Chiarini, and the 1999 declaration of Brescia’s Bishop Bruno Foresti, recognizing the two sisters as “Venerable.”

To the left of the exit door, on the wall, a painting on canvas from the seventeenth or eighteenth century shows us a religious, who could be Angela, in ecstasy. The saint manifests the mystical tendencies which surface in her writings.

The identification of the saint with this figure is disputable. If it were to be treated as a portrait of her, it might involve attributing an actual ecstasy to her. In fact, we know that Angela Merici was always very cautious in dealing with extraordinary mystical phenomena. But this prudence of hers became reverence when she recognized divine intervention.

INDEX