The Farrattini Altarpiece, singular story of an early masterpiece by Federico Zuccari

The curious and unusual affair of the altarpiece that Federico Zuccari painted for the Farrattini Chapel in the Cathedral of Amelia in Umbria, an early masterpiece of the painter from the Marche region, is a beautiful story about a separation and a reunion. Today we have the faculty to admire the Farrattini Altarpiece in the place for which it was conceived, but for a long time Federico Zuccari’s work remained far from its original location, and its return is a recent event. We can count ourselves lucky: there are not many cases of altarpieces that, having left their contexts, have then returned there decades, if not centuries, later. On the contrary: they are decidedly rare, and when such an event occurs, it is customary to hail it as something totally unexpected, as an event surrounded by a miraculous aura. The most recent episode that comes to mind is that of the Ringli Triptych by the Master of Sant’Ivo, executed in 1438 for the church of San Pietro in Avenza, a hamlet of Carrara, which left the Apuan territory perhaps as early as the mid of the 15th century, and then returned to the market in 2018, when it was purchased in a Sotheby’s auction by Galleria Salamon of Milan, which then sold it the following year to the parish of Avenza, at a favorable price: the tenacity of the parish priest, Don Marino Navalesi, prompted the Carrarese community to participate in large numbers in raising the funds needed to regain the altarpiece, which thus returned to its church to general jubilation six hundred years later.

Something similar happened in 1990 for Federico Zuccari’s altarpiece. The commissioner, Baldo Farrattini, a member of one of the most prominent families of Amelia (after his death he would be succeeded by his nephew Bartolomeo, bishop of Amelia since 1562), had probably asked Federico’s brother Taddeo Zuccari for the work at first, but he was busy and turned the commission over to his younger brother, who had to return it to his brother.commission to his younger brother, who had to juggle, scholar Margherita Romano has written, “between the presence of the personality of rigor who supervised and finished perhaps in the first person some of the characters, and the desire for autonomy and to give expression to his growing artistic sensibility by trying to acquire his own territory, his own sphere of work.” The story goes back to the early 1660s (or perhaps even some time earlier), when Federico was in his early twenties and had gone to Umbria in the wake of Taddeo, who had been entrusted, on May 18, 1559, with the task of painting one of the side chapels of Orvieto Cathedral, the Chapel of the Stucco (Federico would also work there, painting three stories of St. Paul). The young man, eager to show off, was not slow to deliver the painting, which for centuries remained there in its home, the Farrattini Chapel: then, in 1881, the heirs moved the large panel, more than three meters high, to the family palace in Amelia, replacing it on site with a copy executed that same year by the Perugian painter Alfonso Morganti, and for more than a century the work remained away from its home. Until, in May 1990, the altarpiece was put up for sale at a Christie’s auction, with the risk that it would end up in a private collection, far from its chapel. However, the intervention of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Terni e Narni was providential, which bought it for 100 million lire and decided, with great intelligence, to have it restored and, two years later, to put it back in its place, where it can still be seen today by anyone who comes to visit the Amelia Cathedral, amidst the funerary monuments of Baldo Farrattini, the work of Ippolito Scalza, and of Bartolomeo, the work of Giovanni Antonio Dosio.

The daring re-entry, however, is not the only of the reasons for interest aroused by the Farrattini Altarpiece, which can be counted among the most significant works in this area of Umbria despite the fact that it appears damaged in several parts, especially along the splits of the boards and at the face on the far left. Meanwhile, it is a relatively recent addition to Federico Zuccari’s catalog: all ancient sources cite it as the work of Taddeo. It took the work of art historian Giovanna Sapori, during the 1890s, to establish the correct autography of the painting, and to assign it to the hand of a very young Federico who intervened to give support to his overburdened brother, and to whom the primal idea of the altarpiece can nevertheless be traced. “It seems to me that it is to be recognized as one of the rare altarpieces of Federico’s youthful activity, and preceding the great paintings of the cathedral of Orvieto, commissioned in 1568,” Sapori wrote, in agreement therefore with Mariano Guardabassi who, in his 1872 Index-Guide dei Monumenti dell’Umbria , first spoke of the work as “attributed to Federico Zuccari.” The subject was then further explored by Sapori in a later study, but already Cristina Acidini Luchinat, in her 1998 monograph on the Zuccari brothers, had agreed on the attribution. “The firm backgrounds full of squillant colors, boldly juxtaposed,” the scholar wrote, “show it adhering to the manner from his brother, confirming a dating prior to the trip to Venice” (the Venetian sojourn dates back to 1564).

The compositional scheme is one of those most common at the time: it is one of many derivations from Raphael’s Madonna of the Baldachin , with the Madonna and Child placed on a high podium, the angels above removing the curtain (although in this case we do not see a curtain, but a particularly vivid jade-green drape covering the back of the throne, and the angels above instead of moving the two flaps are raising a crown), and the saints arranged in strict symmetry: we see St. Peter on the left and St. Bartholomew on the right, i.e., the eponymous saints of the commissioner’s brother and nephew Baldo Farrattini, while at the ends it has been proposed that we recognize St. Lucy and St. John. The examples that might have inspired the Zuccari brothers are numerous, but to limit ourselves to artists from the Umbria-Marches area who looked to Raphael, that is, those who might have been most familiar to them, we can call into question the Madonna and Child with Saints that Raffaellino del Colle painted in 1543 for Sant’Angelo in Vado, the home town of Taddeo and Federico, or, for the pose of the Child, Orazio Alfani’s Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine of Alexandria now in the Louvre but once in Perugia in San Francesco al Prato. The layout of the Farrattini Altarpiece, developed in an ascending sense, is composed, balanced, rigorous, although we observe, in the lower register, several elements that partly break this absolute harmony: the step of the throne on which Saint Bartholomew’s foot rests and which does not have its counterpart on the opposite side, the saint’s own advanced knee whose shape is accentuated by the light flooding the iridescent red fabric, the nonchalance of Saint Peter’s pose which, moreover, averts its gaze from the Virgin and Child. Then note the globe on which the little Jesus places his hand: it is not a stylized and perfect sphere as is often found in works of the time, but seems almost like a globe, a scientific instrument, a piece of vivid realism in an altarpiece that is distinguished by its marked classicism.

One may conclude with one last curiosity: observe the face on the far right, that of the figure who has been interpreted as Saint John. He is turning his gaze outward, toward us, in the usual pose that artists assume in the mirror while portraying themselves. So much so, in fact, that the aforementioned Margherita Romano has proposed (correctly in the opinion of the writer) to identify in that blond, sly face with its barely noticeable beard a self-portrait of Federico Zuccari himself in his twenties. It is, in fact, a very characterized face, and it has some somatic details that can be compared with portraits of the mature Federico: the large, expressive eyes, the long brow arch, the pronounced nose, the spacious forehead. Here he is then, the very young Federico Zuccari, already authoritative and self-confident as he would be throughout his career, looking out at us from his altarpiece, inside the cathedral of Amelia, in the splendid chapel for which it was painted, from where it was removed, and where it finally returned, as in the most beautiful stories with happy endings.

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