From Brera to Urbino: five masterpieces return to Marche region after more than two centuries

After more than two centuries, 100 works are returning home thanks to a project of the Ministry of Culture. From deposits to museums, five important paintings from the deposits of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan have returned to the Marche region. The Galleria Nazionale delle Marche is exhibiting five large altarpieces.

Two were created by Urbino painter Federico Barocci. The museum venue already holds one of the main nuclei of Barocci’s paintings, including the youthful Madonna di San Simone (c. 1567) for the church of San Francesco in Urbino, the Stigmata di San Francesco (1594-95) for the Capuchins in the same city, and the unfinished Assumption of the Virgin, which shows the working method of his last phase; and now it is enriched with two new works: the Madonna and Child in Glory and Saints John the Baptist and Francis, datable to the 1960s, from the Capuchin church in Fossombrone, and theEcce Homo painted for the Oratory of the Disciplinati della Croce in Urbino. This one, transferred to France after the suppression of the Urbino confraternity in 1799, returned to Italy, to the Pinacoteca di Brera in 1811. In 1847 it was displayed in the Church of the Assumption in Costa Masnaga, near Como, only to return to Brera’s storerooms in 1991. The work, left unfinished by the painter’s death, was completed in 1613 by his pupil and workshop agent Ventura Mazza.

Another work is the Madonna and Child, St. Augustine, Magdalene and Angels, made by the Tuscan Cristoforo Roncalli for the church of the Augustinians in Fermo, from which it was taken in August 1811 by Fine Arts Commissioner Andrea Appiani during Napoleonic requisitions. Already in a poor state of preservation on its arrival in Lombardy, it was destined for the church of Besozzo (Varese) and returned to Brera only in 1979, when it was restored: thus the signature and date (1611) re-emerged on the canvas.

Finally, two large altarpieces by Simone Cantarini requisitioned on June 10, 1811, in the midst of the Napoleonic period: the Madonna and Child in Glory and Saints Barbara and Terence, an early work from 1630 made for the church of San Cassiano in Pesaro, and theApparition of the Child Jesus to St. Anthony of Padua, for the church of San Francesco in Cagli, from about 1640.

The five large canvases are housed in the rooms on the second floor of the Ducal Palace of Urbino in the section dedicated to Federico Barocci and painting of the second half of the 16th and 17th centuries, in specially rearranged spaces equipped with a new lighting system.

Ph.Credit Claudio Ripalti

From Brera to Urbino: five masterpieces return to Marche region after more than two centuries

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