BALDASSARE Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) of 1528 offers a uniquely vivid account of the world of Guidobaldo di Montefeltro, and, to an English audience, Urbino and Guidobaldo’s father, Federico di Montefeltro, have been synonymous since the publication of James Dennistoun’s Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino in 1851. It is not fortuitous that two of the great masters of the sixteenth century, Raphael and Federico Barocci, grew up in the shadow of the ducal court at Urbino.
The Montefeltro were granted Urbino in 1155. By the fourteenth century they also controlled the nearby towns of Fossombrone and Cagli on the Roman Via Flaminia, one of the key routes from Rome to the Adriatic and its ports. Equally significant was their dominance of the main road to Tuscany in the west across the Trabaria Pass. Most early visitors would have taken this, and then crossed the hills from Castel Durante, now Urbania, long famous for its maiolica. As Lord Clark observed, the backgrounds of Piero della Francesca’s portraits in the Uffizi of the successful condottiero Federico di Montefeltro, hereditary Count of Urbino, and his wife, Battista Sforza, were inspired by the views from this road. As it curls downwards towards the city, the twin towers of Federico’s palace come into sight – Barocci recorded them from the opposite angle in his astonishing Entombment at Senigallia on the Adriatic coast.
Dominating its hinterland, the palace also looms large above the Piazza Duca Federico. Federico began to build about 1444. In 1465 Luciano Laurana was called in; he left in 1472, and subsequently the Sienese Francesco di Giorgio Martini took over the project. Work had progressed considerably before Federico was elevated as duke in 1474. The entrance from the piazza is relatively restrained. This leads to Laurana’s arcaded courtyard, a concept of singular perfection, marred somewhat by the later addition of a third storey. At the north-eastern angle is the great staircase to the domestic apartments. Nowhere were the precepts of Albertian proportions more assiduously respected than in these. The harmony of the spaces is matched by a fastidious use of ornament. Alas, the possessions of Federico’s della Rovere heirs left for Florence after the surrender of the duchy to the papacy in 1626. But the intarsie of his studiolo, masterpieces of trompe l’oeil deception, survive; so do some of the panels of philosophers by Joos van Ghent originally placed above them, although others are in the Louvre. Federico’s artistic horizons are implied by chance survivals. Joos van Ghent’s damaged Institution of the Eucharist shows how quickly that northern master responded to Italian influences when he entered the ducal service. Paolo Uccello’s chilling predella with the scenes of the profanation of the host by a Jew reminds us that the morality of Renaissance civilization was very different from our own. Piero della Francesca’s peerless Flagellation is a masterpiece of a different order; in recent decades no picture has inspired more self-indulgent iconographical speculation. Opposite is his later Senigallia Madonna, remarkable not least for its subtle modulations of colour. Most characteristic of what we think of as Federico’s world is the celebrated panel of an ideal piazza; it comes as a surprise to realize that the only signs of life in this majestic architectural fantasy are the two doves who sit on a cornice.
Ducal Palace, courtyard by Luciano Laurana.
Shorn of most of its indigenous contents, the palace makes a perfect setting for the Pinacoteca Nazionale delle Marche. Among the early pictures, the altarpiece by the Riminese Giovanni Baronzio stands out, not least for the unusual harmonies of green. The beautifully crisp polyptych by Alvise Vivarini hints at Venice’s long economic influence on the Adriatic coast. The leading native painter of Federico’s time was Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father; his smaller panels have a refinement denied to his more ambitious undertakings. Raphael himself is represented by a wreck once owned by Imelda Marcos and the panel of a lady, ‘La Muta’, too often underrated, which is in some ways the most sophisticated of the portraits of his Florentine phase. On the second floor are the later pictures. Here the hero is unquestionably Barocci. His early Madonna di San Giovanni is instant in appeal, while the late Stigmatization of Saint Francis, of 1594–6, with its nocturnal landscape, is a visionary statement.
To the north of the ducal palace is the cathedral, rebuilt after an earthquake of 1789 by Giuseppe Valadier. The respectable high altarpiece is by that underrated exponent of late Roman classicism, Francesco Unterberger, but it is for two pictures by Barocci that the building is memorable. The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian on the second altar to the right is a precocious exploratory work, more indebted to Correggio than to Raphael. The Last Supper in the chapel to the left of the choir is a more considered masterpiece. Every element of the interwoven composition was worked out on paper. We are left in no doubt of Barocci’s deep spiritual conviction.
On leaving the cathedral, follow the main street to the Piazza Republica, the hub of the city. Abutting this is the Franciscan church with another moving altarpiece by Barocci. The Pardon of Saint Francis was finished in 1576; the saint looks upwards in supplication to the risen Christ. Almost opposite the church, to the right of Via Mazzini, is the narrower Via Barocci, which leads to two remarkable oratories. In the first, the Oratorio di San Giuseppe, is a beautiful stucco Nativity by Federico Brendani, Barocci’s contemporary, who was also responsible for notable plasterwork in the ducal palace and at nearby Piobbico, the fief of the Brancaleoni family. Beyond is the Oratorio di San Giovanni, one of the high points of the late Gothic in Italy. The interior was frescoed in 1416 by the brothers Lorenzo and Jacopo Salimbeni from San Severino. The Crucifixion of the altar wall expresses Lorenzo’s vigour; no incident of the gospel narrative is omitted. The murals of the right-hand wall, illustrating the life of Saint John the Baptist, are more inventive, for the artists were less bound by precedent. Emphatically Italian, they bear us to a wonderland they knew, as it were, partly at secondhand, mediated through northern miniatures and French ivories perhaps, yet expressed with conviction in a southern range of colour. The brothers relished the courtly cavalcade and the brave show of contemporary fashion; they were also acute observers. Their Jordan has its complement of fish and a frog, while water pours down from the heads of the couple whom the saint has baptized.
Oratorio di San Giovanni: Lorenzo and Jacopo Salimbeni, Saint John Baptizing, fresco (detail).
