From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master

In 1934 the Italian government lifted restrictions governing the gabled Barberini Collection in Rome, making it possible for two intriguing fifteenth-century paintings to be put on the international art market. Within just two years both had been sold—one to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Neither their authorship nor their subjects were certain, but their ambitious depiction of architecture no less than their discursive, anecdotal approach to narration made them unique among Early Renaissance paintings. Who was their author? What was their function? How to explain their mastery of perspective and their sophisticated architectural settings? Building on over a century of scholarship as well as completely new archival information, this catalogue proposes answers to all three questions. In doing so, it examines the art of Florence in the 1440s and the work of, among others, Fra Filippo Lippi, Domenico Veneziano, Luca della Robbia, and Michelozzo. It then turns to the introduction of Renaissance style north of the Appenines, in the region of the Marches, and to the culture of the court at Urbino in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, dominated by its ruler, Federico da Montefeltro, the humanist-architect Leon Battista Alberti, and the sublime painter Piero della Francesca.