Galleria Nazionale delle Marche Palazzo Ducale di Urbino
Wise and worldly Duke Federico da Montefeltro (1422–82) paced the halls of this palace and contemplated his vast holdings from the study window, all the while dreaming up some of the most enlightened ideals of the Renaissance. One of the palace’s most enchanting rooms is that study, beautifully paneled with intarsia depicting classical and humanistic writers as well as great religious thinkers. The duke famously came up with the concept of sprezzatura, the ideal of maintaining grace under pressure. Duke Federico and his son, Guidobaldo, oversaw a court so enlightened that Baldassare Castiglione set his 1507 bestseller, Book of the Courtier, in the palace’s Hall of Vigils. Father and son were also patrons of some of the great artists of their day, whose works now hang in the salons and staterooms. “Ideal City,” attributed to Piero della Francesca, perfectly evokes the dukes’ enlightened ideas; della Francesca’s “Flagellation,” another of the palace’s treasures, is one of the Renaissance’s finest accomplishments in perspective. Also look for Paolo Uccello’s similarly masterful work of perspective, “The Profanation of the Host,” a striking bit of 15th-century anti-Semitic propaganda depicting a Jewish pawnbroker attempting to cook the sacred communion wafer (believed to transform into the body of Christ during the Eucharist), as blood seeping under his door attracts bailiffs.
Wise and worldly Duke Federico da Montefeltro (1422–82) paced the halls of this palace and contemplated his vast holdings from the study window, all the while dreaming up some of the most enlightened ideals of the Renaissance. One of the palace’s most enchanting rooms is that study, beautifully paneled with intarsia depicting classical and humanistic writers as well as great religious thinkers. The duke famously came up with the concept of sprezzatura, the ideal of maintaining grace under pressure. Duke Federico and his son, Guidobaldo, oversaw a court so enlightened that Baldassare Castiglione set his 1507 bestseller, Book of the Courtier, in the palace’s Hall of Vigils. Father and son were also patrons of some of the great artists of their day, whose works now hang in the salons and staterooms. “Ideal City,” attributed to Piero della Francesca, perfectly evokes the dukes’ enlightened ideas; della Francesca’s “Flagellation,” another of the palace’s treasures, is one of the Renaissance’s finest accomplishments in perspective. Also look for Paolo Uccello’s similarly masterful work of perspective, “The Profanation of the Host,” a striking bit of 15th-century anti-Semitic propaganda depicting a Jewish pawnbroker attempting to cook the sacred communion wafer (believed to transform into the body of Christ during the Eucharist), as blood seeping under his door attracts bailiffs.
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