Farewell to Paolo Dal Poggetto, great scholar of Renaissance art

Paolo Dal Poggetto, a great scholar of Renaissance art and beyond, passed away yesterday in Florence at the age of 83. Announcing his passing was his wife, also an art historian of international significance, Maria Grazia Ciardi Duprè. Born in Florence in 1936, Dal Poggetto graduated from the University of the Tuscan capital with Roberto Longhi, and from then on began a career that led him to become one of the foremost experts on the Renaissance. In his early thirties he distinguished himself for the contribution he made to save works from the 1966 flood in Florence, while it was in 1975 that he discovered traces of Michelangelo’s drawings in the New Sacristy, also in Florence, at a time when Dal Poggetto was director of the Museum of the Medici Chapels. Then in 1979 came the post of Superintendent of the Marches and director of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, which he held until 2003 and which contributed to making him one of the greatest ever connoisseurs of the Urbino Renaissance (the city of Urbino, moreover, also awarded him honorary citizenship).

There have been many valuable exhibitions curated by Paolo Dal Poggetto, starting with the exhibition Homage to Giotto held in Florence in 1967 and continuing with monographs dedicated to Lorenzo Lotto (1981), Raffaellino del Colle (1983), Pietro Ricchi (1996) and Pedro Berruguete (2003), up to large and successful scholarly exhibitions such as Le arti nelle Marche al tempo di Sisto V (1992), Piero della Francesca e le corti rinascimentali (1992), Fioritura tardo-gotica nelle Marche (1998), I Della Rovere. Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Titian (2004).

His publications are also numerous, including the well-known one on Michelangelo’s “secret room” (the expression was coined by Paolo Dal Poggetto himself) (from 1979, later reprinted), which contains his discoveries on the drawings of the New Sacristy, his research on the Montefeltro, his guides to the National Gallery of the Marches, and the important volume Art in Valdelsa from the 12th century to the 18th century. Alongside his activity as a scholar, Dal Poggetto also worked as a poet, which he cultivated out of passion: his lyrics were published starting in the 1980s. The latter include Rubini azzurri from 1984, Occhi color del vento from 1990, La luna anch’io, e piangere e giocare from 1994, Giardino d’avorio from 2006, Luce dentro altra luce from 2007 and Da lontano la vita, from 2008.

Farewell to Paolo Dal Poggetto, great scholar of Renaissance art

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