A celebration of the genius of Piero della Francesco has drawn an unprecedented number of visitors to the Tuscan city that houses his crowning achievement.
With a week of its three-and-a-half-month run still to go, the Arezzo show has pulled in some 145,000 people, a surprising figure for an exhibition not staged by one of Italy's major art cities.
"We're pretty sure we'll hit the 150,000 mark by the end of the run on Sunday," organisers said this weekend.
"It's already been a remarkable success," they said, "and there are encouraging signs that it's going to put on an extra spurt in the home stretch".
The president of Tuscany, Claudio Martini, said:
"This show is a great national event, an exemplary cultural and organisational model that marks a watershed in Tuscany's cultural policy".
He paid tribute to the way organisers had not only drawn visitors to the medieval city itself but also taken them around the surrounding countryside on the track of other Piero works, "opening a new frontier in cultural tourism".
In Arezzo itself, organisers managed to get six masterpieces to join the Renaissance master's dazzling Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle.
They included Piero's first-ever painting, missing for 50 years until its recent discovery.
The Madonna with Child, which turned up in New York in March, took its place alongside all the other Piero masterpieces that could be moved.
The "splendid six" included Piero's intense portraits of some of his feudal patrons: a famous diptych in Florence's Uffizi Gallery showing the proud rulers of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza - which left the Uffizi for the first time - and the Louvre's fierce portrait of Rimini lord Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta.
Piero's wistful St Jerome came 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, came the charming Madonna di Senigallia, whose background side-lighting shows Piero's growing interest in Flemish art.
The early Madonna with Child was placed opposite the Urbino work so that visitors could see the "extraordinary development of his genius," organisers said.
Eighty works by other painters including Filippo Lippi, Pisanello, Signorelli and Bellini showed Piero's influence.
Signorelli's The Presentation in the Temple came from New York, Pisanello's medallion of Sigismondo Malatesta from London, and Bellini's Madonna from the Brera Gallery in Milan.
Piero's influence spread from humble beginnings around his birthplace in the Tuscan village of Sansepolcro to the grand courts of Tuscany, Umbria, Romagna and the Marches - and even to Rome itself.
The show was 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.
Accordingly, the event aimed to boosting trips across the central Italian 'Piero Trail' that is much more widely known in Italy than abroad.
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 until Sunday.
