Julius II, in Anghiari all the secrets of the 'Warrior Pope'

(ANSA) - ANGHIARI, MAY 21 - The unprecedented link between Julius II, the 'warrior Pope', with the Tuscan town of men of war, Anghiari (Arezzo), is at the center of the third exhibition of Terre degli Uffizi in 2022, hosted until 25 September at the Battaglia and Anghiari Museum and presented today.

    The exhibition, entitled 'The Warrior Pope Giuliano dellaRovere and the men at arms of Anghiari', follows that held last year, again in the Terre degli Uffizi.

   The big news concerns the relations of Giuliano della Rovere (future Pope Julius II) with Anghiari, where in October 1476 he was hosted by a man of arms from the Tuscan village who answered the name of Mazzone di Gregorio.

The latter's family was one of the most influential of the Anghiarese notabilato between the 15th and 16th centuries and had already received Federico da Montefeltro and members of the Urbino court in Anghiari.

Later Mazzone, by virtue of this closeness to the 'warrior Pope', was named 'Bartolomeo Valentino Mazzoni d'Anghiari' and not only admitted by Della Rovere among "friends, family members and comensals", but also exempted from all "gabelles and passages from any place for all the robes: books, silver and more for the use of his person ".

    The exhibition, curated by the director of the Gabriele Mazzi Museum, features a portrait of Julius II on loan from the Uffizi, a copy attributed to Giulio Romano from the famous portrait of the Pope by Raphael.

That painting was immediately so successful that numerous ecopie replicas were made, including one by Titian at Palazzo Pitti in Florence, one at the Galleria Borghese in Rome and another at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.

Julius II is portrayed between October / December 1510 and March 1512, in a moment of severe physical weakness, when he swore to grow a beard until the French were defeated.

Two works by Antonio Tempesta also arrive from the Uffizi Galleries which attest to the success of Leonardo's theories and drawings for cavalry battles.

Among these, the

    Terre degli Uffizi is a project of the Cr Firenze Foundation and the Uffizi Galleries which develops the respective Uffizidiffusi and Small-Large Museums programs, aimed at enhancing the regional artistic heritage by bringing the works to various Tuscan centers.

(HANDLE).