Restoration of Perugino's Fano Altarpiece ends: the work is featured in an exhibition

The Durante Altarpiece, one of the city’s most important works and also known precisely as the “Fano Altarpiece,” one of Perugino ’s (Pietro Vannucci; Città della Pieve, c. 1450 - Fontignano, 1523) best-known works, is returning to Fano after major restoration work. The work is the protagonist of an exhibition dedicated to it, entitled Pietro Perugino in Fano. Primo pictor in orbe, curated by Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari with Emanuela Daffra, and scheduled from December 7, 2023 to April 7, 2024.

An important and long-awaited return after the restoration conducted by theOpificio delle Pietre Dure of Florence, which the public will have the opportunity to see at the Sala Morganti of the Palazzo Malatestiano, in the exhibition-dossier realized by the Municipality of Fano, in collaboration with the Opificio delle Pietre Dure and with the contribution of the Marche Region.

’Primus pictor in orbe’: ’first painter in the world,’ is how Perugino is described in the 1488 contract that brought him to work in Fano, where he was to create two eminent works: the Madonna and Child Enthroned and Saints John the Baptist, Ludovico of Toulouse, Francis, Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene, known as the Pala di Durante, and theAnnunciation.

The work was executed for the high altar of the church of Santa Maria Nuova in San Lazzaro and was made in several stages, between 1488 and 1497. It is so called from the name that appears in the inscription on the pedestal at the feet of the Virgin: Durante di Giovanni Vianuti, who in 1485 made a bequest to the Friars Minor Observant, whose convent was later moved to the present site of the church of Santa Maria Nuova. The main panel depicts the Madonna and Child seated on a high throne with saints on either side. The group is arranged in the shadow of a Renaissance cloister, open in the background to a bright hilly landscape. Complementing the altarpiece is a lunette with Christ in Pieta between the mourners and saints Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea and a predella with five Stories from the Life of the Virgin, in whose realization or at least graphic design, some art historians believe that Perugino’s most brilliant pupil and future protagonist of the art scene, Raphael Sanzio, then just 14 years old, collaborated.

The exhibition-dossier will make it possible to observe the work after restoration and learn about the accounts of the intervention, thanks also to comparisons with digital reproductions. In particular, that with the so-called ’twin altarpiece,’ made for the high altar of the church of the Observants in Senigallia.

The exhibition itinerary, and its virtual reconstructions and reproductions, will tell the story of the moments that comprise the Fano activity, from the foreshortening of the 1480s to the conclusion of the Durante Altarpiece in 1497, when Perugino was at thepeak of his career and, after the success of directing the Sistine worksite in the Vatican, was working at a whirlwind pace that required the reuse of fortunate inventions, with more and less significant variations and with the help of collaborators.

The restoration also made it possible to deepen the study of Perugino’s work, through an extensive campaign of diagnostic, radiographic, photographic and multispectral investigations and examination of the artifacts on the verso, by a multidisciplinary working group of specialized restorers, art historians, scientific experts and photographers. A section that will accompany the exhibition’s itinerary will thus be that relating to the documentation of the restoration, a source of many new and additional acquisitions and clarifications.

Pictured: the Fano Altarpiece during restoration.

Restoration of Perugino's Fano Altarpiece ends: the work is featured in an exhibition

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