The museum, inaugurated in April 2002, has been named after Masaccio, the painter who opened the great age of the Florentine Renaissance, whose first known work is displayed in the adjacent parish church: the famous triptych of Saint Juvenal, dated 23rd April 1422.
Coming from the nearby small church of SanGiovenale, it has been housed here since 1988 for reasons of security and propriety.
The museum has devoted to the painting of the Madonna enthroned with Child and four Saints an entire room of documentation equipped with didactic panels and computer supports. The visitor can look over them either before or after visiting the parish church, one of the most harmonic and suggestive of the Tuscan Romanesque monuments.
But the museum, which one enters through the church apse and is housed on two floors, also displays paintings and precious objects belonging not only to Cascia but also to other important churches of the territory of Reggello, such as: S. Agata in Arfoli, S. Donato in Fronzano, S. Margherita in Cancelli, all of them ancient and endowed with a valuable artistic patrimony largely unknown until now.
Among the paintings to be pointed out are: an important panel from the School of Ghirlandaio (end of 15th century), once exhibited on the main altar in Cascia, a sorrowful Deposition by Santi di Tito (1611), an ascetic Saint Anthony by Jacopo Vignali (17th century). Other works currently under restoration will be added to the works already on display, including a very beautiful panel by the Florentine School of 1575.
In the five rooms, one of which is decorated with elegant wall paintings from the first half of the 1700’s discovered under the plaster and recently restored , we also find real treasures of sacred jewelry of the 15th-19th centuries: among these are to be pointed out: the Astylar Cross of the 1400’s in copper engraved on two sides, the Monstrance in silver and rock crystal of the 18th century, the wooden sculpture of Saint Nicholas of Bari (18th century) which still retains its clothing madeof precious fabric, a chalice in gilded copper with niello-wrought silver inserts of the 14th-15th centuries and two ampullas from the 1700’s with an open pattern in silver.