The story
On the corner of Prato cathedral's façade an open-air pulpit juts out over the square. Donatello and his partner Michelozzo built it between 1433 and 1438 so that the city's great relic, the Virgin's belt known as the Sacred Girdle, could be shown to the crowd below. The marble dancing children up there today are copies. The originals, seven panels of leaping, linked putti, were taken down in 1970 for safety and restored, and they now fill a room of their own in the museum next door.
The museum opened in 1967 in rooms of the bishop's palace, to the left of the cathedral, and grew in 1976 to take in works from across the diocese. The relic theme continues in a reliquary casket made for the girdle by Maso di Bartolomeo in 1446.
In the Renaissance room hangs Filippo Lippi's Funeral of Saint Jerome, painted for the cathedral in the years he was frescoing its main chapel. It was paid for by the churchman Geminiano Inghirami, whom Lippi painted into the scene. A lower room beneath the Romanesque cloister holds the 17th-century paintings.
