Pergamon Museum Management and Curatorship, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 2t~5 308, 1997

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The Liberal Arts Studiolo from the Ducal Palace at Gubbio

Outstanding military leader and patron of the arts, Federico da Montefeltro (1422-1482) was in many ways the archetypal Early Renaissance prince, and shortly after he was created Duke of Urbino by Pope Sixtus IV (1474) he com- missioned the Sienese master, Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439-1502), to modernise and enlarge the Ducal Palace at Gubbio, Federico's birthplace. Within an awkward trapezoidal space, Francesco di Giorgio created the Liberal Arts Studiolo between 1478 and 1483, with its walls lined by a set of wood intarsia panels of the finest quality executed by the Florentine workshop of the brothers Giuliano (1432-1490) and Benedetto da Maiano (1441-1497) surmounted by paintings of the Liberal Arts, probably begun by Joos van Wassenhove and completed by Pedro Berruguete, and with richly painted and gilded coffered ceilings also executed by the da Maiano brothers. The room survived intact until 1673 when the paintings were removed to Florence, and the two known to survive--Music and Rhetoric--are today preserved in the National Gallery, London (Astronomy and Dialectic are presumed to have been destroyed in Berlin in 1945).

The intarsia wall panels and the coffered ceilings remained in situ until their purchase by Prince Filippo Massimo Lancellotti in 1874 and removal to his villa at Frascati. Their restoration was carried out in Rome under Giacomo Mammola, 1874-77, presumably with a view to their reinstallation in the Prince's villa, but they do not appear to have been reassembled at this juncture and the stacked panels were discovered by the German antiques dealer, Adolph Loewi, in 1937 in its attic. Loewi purchased them in 1938 and undertook limited additional restora- tion work in Venice prior to his reassembly of the room there for sale. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased the room in the following year and it was opened to the New York public in January 1941 after some further conserva- tion treatment. This installation was subsequently revealed to embody certain inaccuracies, but the Studiolo remained on display unaltered until 1967 when the Renaissance Galleries were closed for remodelling. The new Italian Renaissance Galleries envisaged in the Museum Master Plan were postponed, but the delays of almost thirty years have enabled the Metropolitan Museum, and above all Dr. Olga Raggio and Antoine Wilmering, to undertake a programme of research and conserva- tion of exemplary rigour. Their meticulous examination of the original room in the Ducal Palace at Gubbio, together with related works such as the equally famous Studiolo still in the Ducal Palace at Urbino (closely comparable in design and completed in 1476), and fresh documentary evidence, has permitted a much deeper understanding of one of the jewels of Early Renaissance art and thus enabled it to be presented as faithfully as possible to the Museum visitors.

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Details of the interior of the Liberal Arts Studiolo from the Ducal Palace at Gubbio as reinstalled in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1996. The intarsia panels executed by the workshop of Giuliano and Benedetto da Maiano in Florence (1478-83) have been the focus of a 10-year programme of research and conservation so that this illusionistic ensemble is now much more faithful to the original conception of Francesco

di Giorgio Martini, created for Federico di Montefeltro, than formerly.

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With the discovery of the precise original heights of the Studiolo ceilings, not least in respect of the window niche which was much higher than previously assumed, and through a number of fresh technical insights, the redisplay of the Studiolo in its new setting in the Museum was completed in May 1996. Furthermore particular attention could be paid to the lighting and the floor surface. Study of the former Studiolo room in Gubbio revealed the importance of the light entering the main space from the two small 'funnel' windows pierc- ing the upper corners of the long wall facing the paintings, in addition to that gained from the main window piercing the niche-like smaller space, within the zone of the intarsia panels. Apart from a better understanding of the original visual impact of the intarsia panels under daylight conditions, the recognition of the significance of the small windows has enabled Olga Raggio and her team to put forward a new reconstruction of the original positioning of the paintings, with the Arts of the trivium (Rhetoric in the centre, flanked L. by Grammar and R. by Dialectic) facing the windows, and those of the quadrivium on the short walls (Astronomy, alongside Geometry above the entrance, and Music next to Arithrnetic facing them).

Few clues as to the style of installation of these paintings survive but, given the coherence of the illusionistic ensemble below, and the repeated use of deep green brocade to cover the steps leading up to the elaborate thrones of the Liberal Arts, it would appear that the upper space too was conceived in terms of a coherent illusionistic ensemble not entirely dissimilar to that created by Mantegna in the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua. However, the seven panel paintings, unlike Man-- tegna's frescoes, would have been separated by three-dimensional framing ele-- ments which would have re-established the planes of the walls and extended the architectural organisation of the intarsia panels zone into that above, thereb) providing rational visual support for the coffered ceilings above. These paintings are not available for incorporation into the Museum ensemble and the upper zone is left discreetly empty with plaster imitating the 15th century intonaco of which fragments survive in situ in Gubbio, but the original floor tiles which do survive intact in Gubbio have been reproduced faithfully for the new floor of 'the Studiolo in New York. During the research into the conservation history of the Studiolo the team located a set of photographs of the ensemble taken in 1938 just after it had been restored and assembled for sale in Venice, and one of these documents an intarsia panel originally mounted below the window. This, together with its pendant for which no photographic documentation is known to exist~ was not included in the installation unveiled in New York in 1941, and their present whereabouts is unknown.

For the reinstallation all the elements--intarsia panels, coffered ceilings and plastered walls--are carried independently by a specially engineered metal framework so that none is liable to distortion because of the weight of any of the others, and the Studiolo now has its own dedicated environmental control uni~ to ensure stable temperature and relative humidity conditions notwithstanding the variable number of visitors liable to be within the confined space at any particular time. The installation design and graphics are by Stephen Saitas, Designer, with lighting by Zack Zanolli, Museum Lighting Designer, and the same team has been responsible for the preparation and mounting of the excel-~ lent didactic exhibition, The Art of the Renaissance Woodworker." The Gubbio

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Studiolo Restored, which was placed on display in the adjoining gallery from 21 May 1996. The Spring 1996 issue of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, has been devoted to the Gubbio Studiolo and contains superbly illustrated articles by Olga Raggio ('The Liberal Arts Studiolo from the Ducal Palace at Gubbio') and by Antoine M. Wilmering ( 'The Conservation Treatment of the Gubbio Studioloi'), and a major book on the Gubbio Studiolo by the same authors, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is promised for 1998.

PETER CANNON-BROOKES

Photo Credits

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1939 (39.153).

The Beaulieu Motorworks PIhS0260-4779(97)O0050-2

Timed to celebrate 100 years of the motor industry in the United Kingdom, the National Motor Museum, Beaulieu, unveiled its most ambitious display to date when in March 1997 H R H Prince Michael of Kent opened the Beaulieu Motor- works which features a recreated country garage of the late 1930s. This display forms part of a street scene which includes a pub, a bicycle repair shop and motor vehicles of the period, and it provides a highly evocative oasis close to the heart of the formal displays of motor vehicles which occupy most of the display areas available in the Museum. Most elderly persons can recall the special atmosphere of a 1930s country garage, even when experienced long after the Second World War, but by their very nature even the buildings are exceptionally rare today and probably no substantially authentic 1930s garage interiors still survive.

In one of the most ambitious recreations attempted by a United Kingdom technology museum, the National Motor Museum has combined historic mate- rial specially acquired for this purpose with hundreds of items drawn from its unrivalled collections of motoring components and accessories. These have been brought together in a tour-de-force of museum display which invited comparison with the best in the world. Authenticity is always an elusive, if not impossible goal when no decision was taken at a specific moment to 'freeze' a given ensemble for its transmission to posterity unchanged. Even an artist's studio at death has to be cleaned and will have been prepared for taking the probate inventory, and on closer examination few if any of the so-called 'untouched ' ensembles can claim to be anything of the sort. H o w then can qualitative judgements be made as to the authenticity or success of a given ensemble if the methodology is so unclear? One has to turn to the subjective genius loci and the success with which a given recreated ensemble evokes the essential character and spirit of, say, a country garage of the late 1930s. In such an ensemble the whole is evidently much