Opening hours:
Tuesday - Sunday: 10:00-18:00
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Sunday: 10:00-18:00
Votive images and ship figureheads collections
of the Maritime Museum "Sergei Masher" Piran
are closely linked to the beliefs of seafarers.
The votive images were given by sailors and fishermen to their patron saints, St Mary, St Basso, St Peter and St Nicholas, as tokens of gratitude for having survived misfortunes at sea. The churches in our three coastal fishing and seaport towns of Piran, Izola and Koper were full of them, but most of them adorned the only nearby Istrian pilgrimage church, the Church of the Apparition of the Virgin Mary in Strunjan, where seafarers also made their vows and commendations.
Ex voto Bortola Giraldi, 1910, oil on canvas, 32,5 x 42,5 cm, inv. no. U. 728
Votive images - ex voto - are classified as folk or naive art, as they were mostly created in workshops, painted by self-taught painters, and are rarely good works of art. These simple pictorial representations, at first painted on wood, later also on canvas and paper, are full of expressiveness and experience. Their rich communicativeness combined with the accompanying records, ''legends'' and other written sources, makes them an extremely valuable source of information for the study of maritime history.
Ex voto by Pietro Degrassi, 1849, oil on wood , 34 x 48,5 cm, inv. no. U. 715
The oldest examples of votive images are painted in tempera or oil on wood. The oldest such surviving image of a "tolelo", donated in Piran, is dated 1643, and is accompanied by the inscription "A di Po Zugno 1643 Voto fato fare Piran".
The collection of votive images of seafarers is an important part of the permanent maritime cultural and historical collection of the Maritime Museum "Sergej Mašera" Piran in its headquarters in the Gabrielli Palace in Piran.
Ex voto by Giacomo Viezzoli, 2nd half of the 19th Century, oil on canvas, 35,5 x 48 cm, inv. no. U. 722
