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Art Travel Vacation to Urbino, Italy
Like the towns of Sansepolcro, Monterchi and Arezzo, Urbino is best reached by car or bus. The trip through the countryside of the Marches is half the joy of going there. The traveler will ride through hills planted with vines and cypresses, the landscape bathed in gentle sunlight. It was here that I first came to understand what is meant by the “light of Italy.” Delicate, never raking, observe how the edges of things become softened, and nature suffused with a sense of tranquility.
Amidst this peacefulness, it may come as a surprise that Urbino was the court city of Federico da Montefeltro , one of the great condottieri (soldier-generals for hire) of the Renaissance period. As successful as he was on the battlefield, however, Federico was no cultural boar. As a boy he had been held hostage in Mantua for two years, and educated together with the Gonzaga children. Federico grew up to become a bibliophile as well as patron of the arts, spending immense sums on the beautification of his ducal residence and private library of illuminated manuscripts. In Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, published in 1528, Urbino served as an emblem of the Renaissance Italian ideal of courtly life, wherein every pursuit is marked by sprezzatura, or the seemingly effortless achievement of beauty and grace.
Studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro, Ducal Palace
The Ducal Palace in Urbino dominates the hill-town, and its architecture may remind the traveler of the fortress-like Castello di San Giorgio in Mantua. But if you examine the western facade, you will observe important differences: note the two slim, delicate towers, which are more decorative than defensive in function, and the four surmounted loggia windows with views over the Italian countryside. The palace is more open and accessible than was typical, implying less fear in relation to the world outside its confines. This, in fact, is one of the hallmarks of Renaissance versus medieval secular architecture in Italy. And indeed, the Ducal Palace (unlike at Mantua , for example) was built wholly during the Renaissance period, most notably by the architects Luciano Laurana (1466 to 1472) and Francesco di Giorgio (1476 onwards.)
The most beautiful room inside is the studiolo, or study of Federico da Montefeltro. It is a small chamber located on an upper floor of the palace, adjacent to the ducal bedroom and dressing room. This is where the duke would retire to read or write. The walls of the room are decorated with remarkable intarsia (inlaid woodwork), no less accomplished in spatial illusionism than paintings of the period. Darker versus blonder or greener woods create the effect of shadows and recession in space, while the design is governed by an overall system of mathematical perspective. You will marvel at the illusion of cupboards open as if to reveal the duke's military armor; musical instruments placed on shelves as if just played; and books whose pages are still turning in air as if hastily set down. It is as if the duke were just there in the room, as present as the (again, fictive) black squirrel nibbling on a nut in the window, or pair of parakeets chirping in a cage.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has on exhibit a similar studiolo, dismantled from another palace of Federico da Montefeltro 's in the hill-town of Gubbio. But that room has less of the vibrancy of this one in Urbino: the woods are in poorer condition, the design is less witty and accomplished, and the palace setting irrevocably lost. Urbino is the place to see probably the finest intarsia work in Italy, still in place next door to the duke's private suite of apartments, and seemingly awaiting his arrival.
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