Notary Chapel

The Notaries Chapel is a splendid building housed inside Palazzo della Ragione, the current seat of the Modern Art Gallery.

As early as the second half of the 14th century, the Palace and the tower of Masseria became the space for the offices and archives of the Order of the Notaries.

In 1408, with the kind permission of the Podestà Nicolò Zorzi, the Chapel inside the Palace was also transferred to the order. The chapel is named after Saint Zeno, patron saint of the city of Verona, and Saint Daniel, patron saint of notaries. The same year the works on the area begins, on a quadrangular plan project in three communicating rooms covered by sail vaults, which will be completed only 11 years later.

Over the centuries the chapel underwent considerable changes due to collapses and fires, as in 1723, dispersing forever the original fifteenth-century decorations. Only an altarpiece by Ruggero Loredano, the Madonna and Child with Saints Zeno and Daniele, now in the storerooms of the Museum of Castelvecchio, was saved.

The works created between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century by the Italian painters Alessandro Marchesini (the Adoration of the Shepherds), Giambattista Bellotti (the Adoration of the Biblical Magi), Gianbattista Canziani (the Sacrifice of Isaac), Andrea Zanoni (the wall paintings), Santo Prunati and the French painter Louis Dorigny (The Miracle of the Cup, The Miracle of the Chariot pulled by demonic oxen, The stories of the life of St. Zeno, The Innocence of Susanna and The Annunciation), representing scenes from the common life of Saints Zeno and Daniel and the theme of justice in the Old and salvation in the New Testament are remaining nowadays.

The decoration is divided between large paintings on canvas in the shape of a lunette, placed on the wall, and smaller oval paintings with original wooden carved and gilded frames, fixed to the vaults. The furniture of the three rooms is completed by a wooden covering of the walls underneath the large painted bezels, of nineteenth-century manufacture.

Inside the Notary Chapel it is possible to perform wedding ceremonies, with a maximum entrance of no more than 40 people. The reservation made refers exclusively to the room chosen for the indicated time. The access route to the hall is defined due to the concomitance of events and manifestations and may be subject to changes even at the last moment.