The Visitation Museum in Moulins, France announces its upcoming exhibit for May through December 2019!
The Museum offers you the discovery of a unique and completely new collection: the heritage of the Monastery of the Visitation of Paris, and through it the history of the French capital seen by its Visitandines.
The exhibits are primarily related to the spiritual life of the nuns through works of art designed to embellish the liturgical ceremonies, but also with the creations of the nuns themselves: embroidery, graphic arts, compositions of paper rolls.
Beyond this monastic dimension, the works presented allow us to penetrate into the unknown world of dozens of women who live at once all together and isolated from the world. Yet, like Parisians, they know the Fronde, revolutions and world wars, sometimes forced to welcome refugees, and sometimes to flee.
Between these tragic episodes, they contribute to the life of the capital by running a boarding school for girls, and welcoming, being in the center of the city, the nuns and bishops who pass through the city. For the Order, the Visitation of Paris was also a great contributor to the revival and founding of many monasteries throughout the nineteenth century and until 1920. Aware of this rich past, the Parisian Visitandines were keen to preserve works that today bear witness to the different periods in the history of Art, through the evolution of styles. The visitor will have the chance to admire successively an ivory sculpture offered by Pope Paul V (1624), a painting by Jean Restout, beautiful pieces of goldsmith Empire and Restoration. Fans will rejoice in the great coherence of Neo-Gothic furniture until the modern chalice commissioned after the liberation of Paris in 1945
On the occasion of this exhibition, the Museum also publishes a 320-page work of art: Hail … Paris. Drawing from its sources in the archives of the Museum and the Visitation, it brings a new light on this house, the lives of those who have lived and the artistic heritage that is preserved there.