For their 400th anniversary, the Visitandines based in Paris are exhibiting in Moulins their rich heritage. A new collection that tells their story, but also their daily lives.
It is in Moulins that the Visitandines of Paris chose to exhibit 400 years of history and treasures. The Museum of the Visitation offers, until December 22, the discovery of a unique and unpublished collection: the heritage of the Monastery of the Visitation of Paris, and through it the history of the French capital seen by its Visitandines.
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Since 1619, although cloistered, the sisters live to the rhythm of the capital. Witness the bullets fired at the monastery during the taking of the Bastille, scrupulously preserved by the sisters, which the visitor will discover at the entrance of the exhibition, the Hotel Demoret. The drawings that tell of the flight of the Visitandines during the attack of 1940 also bear witness to this. On one of them, a boy is sketched, seeing the sisters in their makeshift trolley: “Mother, come and see the carnival”. “One feels the experience,” says Gerard Picaud, co-curator of the exhibition, with Jean Foisselon.
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Pieces of dishes, candles tell the daily life of the sisters in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth. Bindings, the need, new for them, in the twentieth century, to work to earn money. An amazing advertising model of 1950 puts into a scene this activity. The pictorial talent of the sisters allows the congregation to live: creation of menus of marriage, communion …
The floor of the Hotel presents a deluge of goldsmith’s treasures, lace in a baroque decor, with mirrors. Different periods and artistic trends are represented: goldsmiths of the Ancien Régime, including a clock of the early eighteenth that still works. Many neo-Gothic pieces of the nineteenth, including a reliquary copy of that of the holy spine of Notre-Dame-de-Paris. The Empire and the Restoration are not forgotten.
“The sisters were adept before the time of the recovery”, underlines not without humor Gerard Picaud: they have thus, among others, reused parts of a man’s suit of the eighteenth to decorate a box.
Further, twentieth century pieces with very straight Art Deco lines deserve a glance: vases, stylized angels …
Many curiosities are in this exhibition. Gifts for the most part were received by the nuns: for example, this scallop shell came from Jerusalem and used by the sisters for baptisms, Or an aspersoir (sprinkler used to sprinkle holy water), of the eighteenth, rare piece today, because it is very fragile, which traveled from Rome, Lyon and Paris. And finally to Moulins.