MUSEO DE ARTE VISIGODO DE MÉRIDA

The National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida has more than 175 years of history; It began as a small local collection and has ended up becoming a National Museum of great prestige among researchers and the general public. Said category was determined by Decree in 1975 on the occasion of the bimillenary of the city.

Currently, the museum is divided into two buildings with distant locations: the main headquarters, designed by the architect Rafael Moneo and inaugurated in 1986, located on José Ramón Mélida street, and the center for the Visigothic and medieval collection, located on Santa Clara, church located in Santa Julia street, next to the Plaza de España.

There are commitments acquired for years by the Ministry of Culture with the city of Mérida to build a new museum space more in line with contemporary criteria in which to house the Visigothic and post-Visigothic collection in keeping with the high importance of the preserved archaeological and artistic complex. The execution of the new museum project should be completed in 2013.

Mérida was the capital of the Spanish provinces in low imperial times, it maintained its pre-eminent position as the center of the Suevian kingdom; In the Visigothic period it was one of the main cities of the kingdom, reaching notable pre-eminence as one of the main cultural centers and center of defense of Catholicism against the Arian heresy embraced by the Visigoths. The high hierarchy of Mérida in Hispanic lands generated a set of high-quality archaeological materials, some of which are preserved in the Visigothic Section of the National Museum of Roman Art.

The church of Santa Clara is the deconsecrated temple of the former convent of the same name, confiscated by Mendizábal. It is a beautiful Baroque building (17th century) with a Latin cross plan, a single nave, a flat front, barrel vaults and a dome on pendentives in the transept, but inadequate as a container for a collection of first-rate archaeological materials in the context Hispanic. In 1986, when the National Museum of Roman Art was inaugurated, the Visigothic section remained in Santa Clara temporarily, the provisionality of which has already exceeded four decades.

The large exhibition space has two rooms, the largest one for the Late-Ancient-Visigothic collection (4th-8th centuries), and the smaller one, also called the Shield Room, a room attached to the nave of the church, to the west, which houses heraldic elements from Emeritense palaces from the 16th-18th centuries, as well as some medieval pieces, among which the founding inscription of the Emeritense citadel stands out, raised by ‘Abd al-Rahman II in the year 835.

The Visigothic section has more than 800 pieces whose origin is both the city and settlements in the surrounding environment, highlighting the quality of those from the Casa Herrera basilica. It is a heterogeneous set in terms of its origin and use, but of great cultural, aesthetic and archaeological value; among them we have construction materials, liturgical furniture, funerary remains, numismatics, personal ornaments, ceramics, among others.

Among the most relevant pieces, the Bishop’s Chair, the plaques-niche, the gates, the altar holders, the capitals, and the pilasters with elegant symbolic ornamentation carved on their surface must be highlighted.

<p style=”text-align: right;”><em><strong>Victor Gibello</strong></em><strong> </strong>for UBS REGIA</p>

ÁLVAREZ MARTÍNEZ, José María; y DE LA BARRERA, José Luis: Guia breve de la colección visigoda. Museo Nacional de Arte Romano. Mérida, 2002.
NOGALES BASARRATE, T. (ed.): Museo Nacional de Arte Romano. Catálogo de publicaciones en línea, Madrid, 2015.
Museo Nacional de Arte Romano de Mérida. Guía 2020.

Sección Visigoda del Museo de Arte Romano de Mérida o Museo Visigodo

Colección Visigoda – Museo Nacional de Arte Romano