Urbino

Urbino is a city in the Marche in Italy, southwest of Pesaro, a World Heritage Site with a great cultural history during the Renaissance as the seat of Federico da Montefeltro. It has retained some of its picturesque medieval aspect on steep sloping ground, though tourists' carparks occupy the former fields below. Urbino is home to the University of Urbino, founded in 1564, and is the seat of the Archbishop of Urbino (see below)

Luciano Laurana and the Palazzo Ducale

The Ducal Palace was rebuilt for duke Federico da Montefeltro by Luciano Laurana, an architect from Dalmatia who had seen Brunelleschi's cloisters in Florence. The light and noble arcaded courtyard at Urbino rivals that of the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome as the finest of the Renaissance. Overcoming the exigencies of the clifflike site, which made an irregular massing of architecture necessary, from the 1460s onwards Laurana created what contemoraries considered the ideal princely dwelling. In high plain stuccoed rooms, the richly sculptured doorways, chimneys and friezes stand apart, executed by Domenico Rosselli of Florence, Ambrogio d'Antonio of Milan and their workshops. The beautifully executed intarsia work of the Duke's small study (the Studiolo), with trompe-l'oeil shelves and half-open latticework doors display symbolic objects representing the Arts, is the single most famous example of this Italian craft of inlay.

Related Topics:
Dalmatia - Brunelleschi - Palazzo della Cancelleria - Trompe-l'oeil

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The palace continued in use as a government building into the 20th century, housing municipal archives and offices, and public collections of antique inscriptions, of sculpture, and the paintings gallery, including works by Paolo Uccello, Giovanni Santi, Justus of Ghent (a Last Supper with portraits of the Montefeltro family and the court), Timoteo della Vite, and other i5th-century artists, and a late Resurrection by Titian.

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