Urbino, Luca della Robbia's lunette to be restored with public-private agreement

In Urbino, Luca della Robbia’s Madonna and Child with Saints Dominic, Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great and Peter Martyr, a glazed terracotta lunette made between 1450 and 1451 and kept at the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, will be restored. In ancient times, the work was on the portal of the church of San Domenico, right in front of the Ducal Palace in Urbino, where it was placed in 1454 (it is believed to be Federico da Montefeltro’s first artistic commission. Today, it is instead displayed in the first room of the apartment of Jole, at the beginning of the Urbino museum’s exhibition itinerary, where it arrived in the 1970s for conservation reasons, and was restored thanks to a collaboration between the museum and Confindustria Pesaro-Urbino.

After more than 40 years since the last restoration, it became necessary to intervene again on the work, to stop a process of degradation triggered by the presence of salts that, from inside the terracotta, had begun to resurface, causing the detachment of the delicate surface glazing. The operation, which the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche has taken charge of, involves a cost of about 30,000 euros, which, thanks to the contribution of Confindustria Pesaro Urbino, is considerably reduced. In fact, the Confindustria Culture Committee, chaired by Gastone Bertozzini, has decided to contribute to the restoration of the San Domenico lunette by giving a grant of 10,000 euros to the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche.

The public-private collaboration was born with the desire to encourage the meeting between different realities of the territory, the world of business and the world of culture. Two realities that are not too far apart if, as has been shown (and even more so during the pandemic), culture plays an important role in the economic world, both through induced activity and by increasing social welfare. And now the museum is emphasizing how the attention of economic operators active in the area to their heritage can only trigger processes of growth in living standards of undoubted social benefit.

“We are satisfied,” says Cavalier Bertozzini, “for having made another fundamental contribution to the art of the City of Urbino. Honored also for the collaboration with the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche container of extraordinary works.”

“Belonging to the territory,” stresses Luigi Gallo, director of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, “is not simply a geographical connotation, but an active presence in the social fabric. The participation of the business world, by its own means, in cultural life, shows how the growth of the territory benefits from this permeability between the different operators.”

Urbino, Luca della Robbia's lunette to be restored with public-private agreement

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