Museo Parrocchiale di San Giacomo Maggiore

Sacred art museum of the Campertogno parish in Valsesia, with about 500 works including paintings, wooden sculptures, furnishings and goldsmith’s work.

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About the museum

The parish museum of Campertogno, in the upper Valsesia, was founded on the initiative of parish priest Don Pier Cesare De Vecchi and holds a collection of about 500 inventoried objects: paintings, gilded and painted wooden sculptures, furnishings, sacred vessels and goldsmith’s works. Many pieces come from the old parish church, which predates the present 18th-century building, including the pyramid-shaped wooden altar of 1660; others come from oratories and chapels in the area, which were often targeted by thefts and tampering.

The most important work is an oil painting on canvas by Melchiorre D’Enrico, signed on the cloth covering the cross, which depicts the votive procession of the Campertogno confraternities to the Sacro Monte di Varallo, carried out after the village was spared a plague that had caused 28 deaths. The collection also bears witness to the tradition of local families of artists, active for centuries as cabinetmakers, sculptors, fresco painters, goldsmiths, decorators and stuccoists in the Turin area, in Lombardy and even in France, without ever losing their bond with their home village.

Highlights

About 500 inventoried sacred art objects
Pyramid-shaped wooden altar of 1660 from the old parish church
Painting by Melchiorre D’Enrico showing the votive procession to the Sacro Monte di Varallo
Gilded and painted wooden sculptures and sacred goldsmith’s work