Federico Barocci Urbino L'emozione della pittura moderna

The volume accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, running from 19 June to 6 October 2024.

To mark the year of Pesaro Capital of Italian Culture 2024, the Gallery is presenting the first major monographic exhibition dedicated by Urbino to one of its most illustrious sons: Federico Barocci (1533-1612). A painter, an extraordinary draftsman and an innovative engraver, Barocci made his impression on the Italian and European art scene for almost a century. Despite his decision to remain in his hometown, far from the great centres of culture and patronage, he managed to establish himself with tenacious effort as the most admired, sought-after and highly paid creator of sacred paintings in the second half of the sixteenth century. Working directly for popes, sovereigns and emperors, thanks in part to the mediation of his lord and friend, the Duke of Urbino Francesco Maria II della Rovere, Barocci participated independently in the spiritual poetics of the Counter-Reformation. His cultivated and sensitive painting fuses the influences of the High Renaissance with more current models, creating a development parallel to the traditional canon of art history. The heir to Raphael’s classicism, inspirer of the naturalism of the Carracci and carefully responsive to Titian and Correggio’s colourism, in the last phase of his career the artist sensed the subsequent developments of Caravaggism, creating altarpieces in chiaroscuro whose monumental figures anticipate the Baroque vocabulary.

The exhibition, and the catalogue that accompanies it presents over 80 paintings and drawings and is divided into eight narrative nuclei, interpreted according to an order that links the temporal sequence of Barocci’s work to a diachronic presentation organised according to the different themes of his painting: the Urbino environment, with the portraits of its protagonists; the development of the grand machinery of the altarpiece, inspired by the principles of the Counter-Reformation; the unprecedented naturalistic sensibility, stemming from continuous meditation on the inspirational Urbino landscape, until his last, poignant works, in which the colour softens to become pure chromatic feeling.