Galleria Nazionale delle Marche

The Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, Italy, occupies the Renaissance Ducal Palace built by the dukes of Urbino in the 15th century. Its fabric and decoration grew under the ducal court of the Italian Renaissance and the palace housed an important ducal collection of paintings, tapestries, library volumes and interior furnishings that made it a cultural center for the duchy.

Construction and decoration reached a high point in the mid to late 1400s when Federico da Montefeltro commissioned richly appointed private rooms. A small wooden alcove was created around 1459–1460 and the small study known as the studiolo was finished in 1476, fitted with a stuccoed vaulted ceiling and a band of elaborate marquetry (wood inlay work). At that time the palace contained a large library and cycles of painted portraits and panels that reflected the intellectual ambitions of the ducal household.

The palace and its collections suffered repeated removals of art and furnishings. In 1502 Cesare Borgia, after taking control of the duchy, dispersed part of the ducal holdings, including a sculptural work by Michelangelo that was later lost. After the duchy’s transfer to the Papal States in 1631, the movable goods of the house were treated as the dowry of Vittoria della Rovere on her marriage to Ferdinando II de’ Medici; jewels, sculptures, gems and numerous paintings were moved to Florence or sold, among them works by Raphael, a ducal diptych by Piero della Francesca and a group of Titian paintings such as the Venus of Urbino.

Following the 1631 change in rule, Cardinal Antonio Barberini removed parts of the studiolo decoration and several chapel paintings; many of those pieces remained in the Barberini collection before passing to other private collections in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with some works later acquired by the Italian state and returned to Urbino. In 1657 Pope Alexander VII transferred hundreds of illuminated books from the ducal library to the Vatican Library and the palace’s decorative leather wall coverings were destroyed. During the Napoleonic era a group of fourteen portraits from the studiolo cycle went to France and are today in the Louvre; this formed the largest single group taken from Urbino in that period.

The modern museum institution was established in 1912. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century processes of suppression and redistribution also shaped the gallery’s holdings: after Italian unification in 1861 many works from churches and convents in the surrounding region entered public collections, and named bequests and deposits continued to augment the gallery. The Mauruzi gift of 1865 brought Castelli ceramics, and later legacies and purchases — including the Volponi deposits in the 1990s and 2000s, a collection of Roman coins in 2000, and acquisitions from foundations — expanded the displays. In 1975 two masterpieces were stolen, the Madonna of Senigallia and The Flagellation by Piero della Francesca; both were recovered in Locarno in March 1976. Exhibition spaces were reorganized in 1982 and paintings that had been held in Barberini collections were bought by the State and reinstalled in the studiolo in 1983. The institution gained special autonomous museum status in 2014, and in 2022 a new arrangement of the second-floor galleries opened, made possible by a deposit from the local savings bank foundation.