Italy is set to celebrate the great Renaissance painter Piero Della Francesca with a show that brings together his masterpieces for the first time ever.
Fittingly, the exhibition will take place in Arezzo, the Tuscan town that houses Piero's crowning achievement, the Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle.
Curators are confident of securing "at least half" of Piero's masterpieces that can be moved, including the intense portraits of some of his feudal patrons: the famous diptych in Florence's Uffizi Gallery showing the proud rulers of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, and the Louvre's fierce portrait of Rimini lord Sigismondo Malatesta.
Other certain arrivals, organisers say, are Piero's wistful St Jerome from the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice, accompanied by an ethereal Madonna from that city's Cini Foundation.
From Urbino, the 'ideal city' where Piero perfected his ground-breaking studies in perspective, comes the charming Madonna di Senigallia, whose background side-lighting shows his growing interest in Flemish art.
Co-curator Antonio Paolucci, the former artistic superintendent of Florence, noted that Piero's influence spread from humble beginnings around his birthplace in the Tuscan village of Sansepolcro to the grand courts of Tuscany, the Marches, Romagna, and even Rome itself.
"It became the unifying language of the painting of his time," Paolucci said at a presentation here.
Eighty works by other painters will show Piero's influence.
Talks are under way to bring nine of Piero's masterworks to Arezzo, said the other curator, art expert Carlo Bertelli.
"We would have liked to have more but we didn't dare ask for some of the 'untouchables', like his Flagellation in Urbino," Bertelli said.
However, the show will be combined with a tour of the surrounding villages where Piero (1412-1492) made his name in the 1430s: above all, Sansepolcro with its poignant Madonna della Misericordia poliptych and peerless Resurrection fresco, but also the graveyard in nearby Monterchi, where he painted his celebrated Madonna del Parto in a chapel near his mother's grave.
"It will be a festival of art," said Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli, promising to boost trips across a central Italian 'Piero Trail' that is much more widely known in Italy than abroad.
"This artistic itinerary, through some of the most beautiful stretches of the Italian landscape, should be made permanent and organised," he said.
A recently discovered treatise on Archimedes, annotated by the artist with geometrical jottings in the margins, is among the other jewels on show in Arezzo's Museo Statale d'Arte Medievale e Moderna from March 31 to July 22.
