The Antegnati organ in the Duomo Vecchio of Brescia is one of the greatest surviving instruments from the Italian Renaissance for both the quantity and the quality of the original materials preserved. Built in 1536 by Gian Giacomo Antegnati, the organ still retains 1,300 original tin pipes, the oldest and largest group of Antegnati pipes in existence today, and much of its original wooden case, carved by sculpture Battista Piantavigna in 1537.

Also known as the Rotonda, the Duomo Vecchio (Old Cathedral) is a rarity in its own right: a Romanesque circular church from the 11th century that is one of the only ones of its kind to survive in Italy. It also bears the distinction of standing right next to what in most circumstances would have been its replacement, the Duomo Nuovo. They are officially co-cathedrals, the old known as the Winter Co-Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta and the new as the Summer Co-Cathedral.

The Duomo Vecchio was the sole Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta when the organ was built. (Construction of the Duomo Nuovo began over the demolished San Pietro de Dom in 1604.) The organs made by the Antegnati family were famed for their exceptional quality, and 50 years after the cathedral organ was complete, Constanzo Antegnati boasted that “the organ that is now played in our Domo is considered one of the best and most famous that can be heard today in all of Italy.”

Girolamo da Romano, known as Romanino, was engaged to paint the organ doors in 1539. He painted both the interior left and right doors, visible when the doors were open and the organ was being played, and the exterior doors forming a single double-wide composition when they were closed. The interior left door features the Birth of the Virgin Mary, while the Visit to Elizabeth is on the interior right door. The big scene on the closed double doors is the Marriage of the Virgin.

Romanino integrated the Marriage scene, and therefore the monumental façade of the organ itself, into the architecture of the church, extending the visual motif to frescoes on the walls flanking the organ. In a 17th century catalogue of the churches of Brescia, Bernardino Faino describes Romanino’s painting of the doors and flanking walls:

The doors of this [organ] are painted in oil both inside and outside by the hand of Girolamo Romanino also from Brescia, soft and full coloring that imitates Titian. Painted on the inside are the Visitation of a Woman and the Nativity. On the outside the Marriage of the said Blessed Virgin is represented, with a quantity of figures, and on the façade where the organ is mounted many figures made by the aforementioned in fresco that accompany the said story.

The “many figures” on the frescoes to the left and right are musicians. They flank the depiction of the Marriage of the Virgin painted on the exterior of the double doors of the organ so you see the scene only when they’re closed. (When they’re open they obviously obscure the walls on either side.) The musicians match the wedding scene, a sort of live band for the central festivities, and Romanino matched the revolving columns on the sides of the organ that opened and closed the doors with painted columns in remarkably lifelike realism and perspective. The musicians play percussion and wind instruments only, including a Renaissance cornetto. There are no string instruments, almost certainly a deliberate omission to connect the painted musicians to the sounds produced by the organ. Scholars hypothesize that the two bystanders on the left wall represent Gian Giacomo Antegnati and Giovanni Piantavigna, makers of the organ and case, and the bystander on the right wall is a self-portrait of Romanino, tying the art of the organ, both the painting on it and the music from it, to its creators.

This marvelously unified vision was split up and hidden over the centuries as the organ underwent numerous modifications and restorations. The original organ doors were moved to the Duomo Nuovo when it was finally completed 200 years ago, framed and mounted on a chapel wall as a triptych. The frescoes were whitewashed into oblivion. The organ was enlarged in 1826 by organ-makers the Serassi Brothers of Bergamo. They were contractually obligated to preserve all of the sound materials, most importantly the Antegnati tubing.

Less than two centuries after that restoration, the precious pipes were in parlous condition, attacked by “tin cancer,” a type of corrosion frequently seen in historic organs in northern Italy. In 2014, the parish, city and non-profit organizations began to raise and allocate funds for an emergency intervention to address the corrosion before it ate away at the pipes. Conservators found many other issues that needed addressing including gaps and dents at the base of the pipes and rotted leather gaskets and bellows.

The damage required that the organ be dismantled and restored by specialists off-site. In 2017, the comprehensive restoration began. The Piantavigna case, which remained in the cathedral, was restored in situ. It was during work on the case that restorers removed the whitewash on the walls to the side of the organ and revealed the long-lost Romanino frescoes last mentioned by Faino. Twelve figures emerged from the white-out: eight musicians and four bystanders.

The original organ doors were reclaimed from the Duomo Nuovo and returned to their proper placement on the revolving columns. The columns were repaired and a new remote-controlled system installed to open and close them. Another historic gem was found inside one of the columns: a note folded 32 times that had been hidden by the craftsman who made the column. It reads: “Mi Pasì da Pasira si fat questi coloni de l’orgen del dom / El dì 12 de aprilil mili 538,” meaning “I, Pasino da Passirano, made these columns of the organ of the Duomo/The day 12 of April 1538.”

The organ has been completely restored by the Fratelli Mascioni company and reassembled. The large bellows have been placed in the specially prepared room behind it. The windchests (boxes that receive the air introduced by the bellows to transmit it to the pipes) of the double basses (the pipes of the lowest registers) with the long wooden pipes have been positioned inside the ancient case, freeing the view of the rediscovered frescoes by Romanino. The master windchest and the auxiliary ones have been connected to the keyboard and pedal board. Most of the pipes, after the meticulous restoration, have been placed in their original positions.

The bellows were opened and cleaned and re-cased after removing the old exhausted skins. The wind pipes were restored by repairing the cracks, replacing the gaskets and restoring the original paint. The mechanics were restored and integrated where missing. The keyboard was rebuilt according to the original measurements and shapes, the natural note keys were covered in ebony and those of the altered notes in walnut, with ivory plating kindly donated by a private individual.

The pedalboard was rebuilt according to the “lectern” type, with measurements taken from the Serassi organ in the church of S. Oliveto. The restoration of the pipes required a great deal of effort to remove the “tin cancer” that had attacked a good part of the “Antegnati” pipes.

On November 19th, 2023, the restored Antegnati organ played again after six years of silence. You can hear its restored sound in this Italian news story:

The royal funerary regalia of rulers of Poland and Lithuania has been discovered in the underground vaults of Vilnius Cathedral in Lithuania. The regalia includes three funeral crowns, a scepter, an orb, rings, chains and coffin plaques that were secreted in a niche in the wall of the crypt shortly after the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

They were originally placed in the coffins of Alexander Jagiellon (1461-1506), King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, Elizabeth of Habsburg (1526–1545), the first wife of Sigismund II Augustus (1520-1572), and his second wife Barbara Radziwiłł (1520/23-1551). In 1931, the burial crypts were exposed during work after a flood that damaged the cathedral. The coffins of the three royals and the royal regalia they contained were salvaged.

When World War II broke out eight years later, Vilnius Cathedral was at risk of being closed, so the Cathedral Chapter set to hiding the church’s wealth before it was targeted by marauders. The treasury was walled up in a niche in one of the staircases. The funerary regalia was hidden somewhere in the vaults, but obviously neither location was documented as that would have defeated the purpose of, you know, hiding them.

The treasury was rediscovered in 1985, but the regalia took a little more work. The Vilnius Archdiocese engaged specialists to search for the spot using non-invasive methods — georadar, thermal imaging, metal detectors — and testimony from a witness present when the regalia was hidden, but came up empty. In 2023, they planned to use a 3D scanner to create a detailed map of the vaults, but unfortunately the funding fell through. Finally, on December 16, 2024, an endoscopic camera was threaded through pre-existing cracks and holes in the walls. After several failed attempts, the camera finally spied the long-lost royal funerary regalia. The wall was dismantled and the objects removed so they could be documented, catalogued and moved to safety.

“I am grateful to everyone who willingly participated in this search, and I am sincerely glad that these valuables were finally discovered thanks to the cooperation of several institutions. Now they will be studied, restored and presented to the public in the future. The discovered burial signs of the rulers of Lithuania and Poland are priceless historical values, symbols of the long-standing traditions of Lithuanian statehood, signs of Vilnius as the capital, and remarkable works of jewelry,” the archbishop noted.

An electrician doing maintenance work in the 16th century Villa Farnesina in Rome uncovered frescoes in vivid color hidden behind a later vaulted ceiling. Electrician Davide Renzoni was on top of high scaffolding when he spotted a trap door in the barrel vaulting that had been added to the living room of the villa in the 19th century. The door opened onto a cavity between the newer ceiling and the original one. Shining a light in the darkness, Renzoni was greeted by a profusion of cherubs against blue skies and rolling hills.

Built for papal banker Agostino Chigi between 1506 and 1510, the Farnesina was an innovative design, a suburban villa on the banks of the Tiber with a u-shaped floorplan and open loggias stood. It is best known today for its exquisite frescoes on mythological subjects by High Renaissance luminary Raphael and other greats including Sebastiano del Piombo, Giulio Romano, Bladassare Peruzzi and Il Sodoma. Cardinal Alessandro Farnese acquired the villa in 1579 and the newly-discovered frescoes date to the Farnese era.

That is evident in the newly-discovered frescoes. There are three surviving areas: one lunette featuring a large standing cherub holding a plumed helmet in front of rolling hills with a tower and manor house in the mid-ground, two cherubs on blue backgrounds in the corbels, and in the center of the barrel vault, a sky filled with cherubs flying around the Farnese coat of arms. They were commissioned by Abbot Giuseppe Melchiorri who rented the villa from the Farnese Duke of Parma. His lease contract enjoined him from making any unauthorized alterations to the building, but his inventory records indicate he did order paintings for at least one gallery.

Between 1861 and 1863 major restoration work was carried out on the Villa Farnesina, particularly on the first floor, which had been radically altered from the 16th-century configuration designed by Baldassarre Peruzzi for Agostino Chigi. Architect Antonio Sarti found serious structural damage due to the load on the walls above the vaults and proposed consolidation works. The main hall was divided into two parts, distorting the original spatiality and adding new service rooms, including an elevator shaft.

The discovery of the frescoes, which were spared by the insertion of the elevator, constitutes a significant novelty for the knowledge of the building and its seventeenth-century decorative phase, obtained as part of the conservation and restoration activities carried out by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in collaboration with the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.

Renzoni found the frescoes last year but the discovery was kept under wraps while conservators and researchers restored and studied them. Because they are in an inaccessible area, the frescoes cannot be exposed to the visiting public, but the Villa has found a way to virtually feature them in its new exhibition about the 17th century Villa Farnesina. High-resolution photographs and 3D reconstructions will showcase the frescoes and display what the living room looked like at various times.