Museu do Oratório, Religious art museum at Adro do Carmo, Ouro Preto, Brazil

Museu do Oratório is a religious art museum housed in a three-story historic building next to Igreja do Carmo, displaying more than 160 portable home altars and around 300 sacred images. The collection features handcrafted pieces and saint figures from different regions of Brazil.

The museum was created in 1998 by the Instituto Cultural Flávio Gutierrez, the Gutierrez family's cultural institute, which owns the collection. Its president, Ângela Gutierrez, donated the pieces to IPHAN. The French museographer Pierre Catel designed the museum, installed in a three-story colonial townhouse attached to the Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Carmo.

The collection shows how Brazilians practiced their faith at home through small portable altars and religious images from the 17th to 20th centuries. These objects reveal the personal ways people created sacred spaces in their everyday lives.

The museum is housed in a compact three-story building that is easy to explore on foot and clearly visible from the nearby Igreja do Carmo. The interior is straightforward to navigate, making it possible to view the entire collection at a comfortable pace.

The collection numbers 162 oratórios and 300 images, donated by Ângela Gutierrez to IPHAN. The pieces range from the 17th to the 20th century and vary in type, size and material, from travel shrines small enough to wear as jewellery to convent-made examples recalling Portuguese decoration traditions.