Italy has brought together six masterpieces by Piero Della Francesca for a major new show - including the first ever painting by the Renaissance master, missing for 50 years until its recent discovery.
The Madonna with Child, which turned up earlier this month in New York, is set to take its place alongside all the other Piero masterpieces that can be moved, organisers say.
The "splendid six" include his 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, and the Louvre's fierce portrait of Rimini lord Sigismondo Malatesta.
Piero's wistful St Jerome has come 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.
"We have obtained all of the works we could feasibly ask for," said co-curator 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.
The March 31-July 22 exhibition has been fittingly organised in Arezzo, the Tuscan town that houses Piero's crowning achievement, the Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle.
Eighty works by other painters including Filippo Lippi, Pisanello, Signorelli and Bellini will show Piero's influence.
Signorelli's The Presentation in the Temple has come from New York, Pisanello's medallion of Sigismondo Malatesta from London, and Bellini's Madonna from the Brera Gallery in Milan.
Co-curator Antonio Paolucci, the former artistic superintendent of Florence, said Piero's influence spread from humble beginnings around his birthplace in the Tuscan village of Sansepolcro to the grand courts of Tuscany, Romagna and the Marches.
"It became the unifying language of the painting of his time," Paolucci said.
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," Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli said recently, promising to boost trips across a 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 from March 31 to July 22.
