It is an exhibition that wants to make the general public retrace in a clear and perceptible way the richness of the fast and extraordinary education of the artist, "Young Raphael in Città di Castello and his gaze", in the Municipal Art Gallery from 30 October to 9 January 2022. Also with a new museum route now accessible from the original monumental entrance. The exhibition - promoted by the Umbrian Regional Committee for Raphaelesque celebrations, approved by the National Committee for the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the death of Raffaello Sanzio, curated by Marica Mercalli, director general for the safety of the cultural heritage of the Mic, and by Laura Teza , associate professor of History of Modern Art ofUniversity of Perugia - wants to reconstruct the experiences that the very young painter could live in an environment full of stimuli and full of past cultural past linked to Luca Signorelli's stay in the city. In the preview for the press, which revealed the setting up of the noble floor, where the review unfolds in different rooms, the mayor of Città di Castello Luca Secondi retraced its history, which was born before the pandemic and laboriously resisted months of lockdown and forced stop of events. "Few, if not the insiders, know that Raphael made his debut in Città di Castello", underlines Teza, recalling that in December 1500 the very young painter signed his first contract with Andrea Baronci for the Coronation of San Nicola da Tolentino in Sant 'Augustine,a large table almost four meters high. "He was only 17 years old but he was called magister Rafel, that is, he is an independent master with a shop and had to pay taxes". And the large panel with the Coronation of St. Nicholas of Tolentino, damaged in the earthquake of 1789 and since then scattered in fragments, is reconstructed on this occasion in its main pieces. The heart of the story is Raphael's double-sided banner, his only mobile work left in Umbria, coming from the Confraternity of the Holy Trinity in Città di Castello and now preserved in the picture gallery. Restored for the occasion, it is evocatively set up vis à vis with the Martyrdom of San Sebastiano by Luca Signorelli, kept in the same art gallery on the ground floor. An exhibition that will then remain permanent,testifying to Raphael's gaze that bound them together forever. Still very young, the painter, always on the hunt for new stimuli which he quickly translated on paper, took up in a drawing now in Oxford the archer from behind taken from Signorelli's Martyrdom alongside the figure of the 'God the creator of Eve' who was studying for its banner of the Trinity. "Raphael wanders around the churches of Città di Castello and notes, studies, in a very rapid, burning process of assimilation. - underlines the curator Teza-Della Crocefissione Gavari Mond who will leave in San Domenico, placed just vis-à-vis with the Martyrdom of Signorelli, Vasari will say that, if there were no writing under his signature, it would be said of Perugino. In fact in those years he competed with the models of Perugino and Pintoricchio,to whom he supplied preparatory drawings and cartoons for the Piccolomini Library in Siena, receiving in exchange a very refined taste for precious decoration. The Madonna della Pace of Sanseverino di Pintoricchio, present in the exhibition, is a sparkling testimony of this goldsmith's taste, encrusted with golden reflections. "Thanks to the use of videos, translated into various languages, the exhibition reconstructs the environmental context of the other Raphael's works carried out in Città di Castello and now preserved elsewhere. To close the path there is the Marriage of the Virgin (1504), the painting that marks the turning point in Raphael's career and whose setting is measured, in a deliberate comparison and tight, with the analogous subject that Pietro Perugino was preparing for the Cathedral of Perugia.with 17 essays by some of the most important scholars of Raphael, it analyzes the artist's youthful activity in the years spent in the Umbrian city between 1499 and 1504. Tomorrow, from 6 pm, the opening to the public. Reservations are recommended (cultura@ilpoliedro.org, 075 8554202).
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