The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston presents Piero della Francesca’s Senigallia Madonna in a single-work exhibition on view from September 13, which showcases the rare Renaissance painting, the Senigallia Madonna (1470s), and recounts the fascinating story of its theft and recovery in the 1970s. On loan from Italy, the work was created by Italian master Piero della Francesca (1411/13–1492) and will be on view in the United States for the first time.
Stolen in 1975, the tempera and oil on panel painting was recovered the following year by the Carabinieri Department for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (known as the Carabinieri Art Squad)—a branch of the Italian military police charged with combating theft, looting and illicit trade in works of art. Part of the MFA’s Visiting Masterpieces series, Piero della Francesca’s Senigallia Madonna: An Italian Treasure, Stolen and Recovered will be on view through January 6, 2014 in the Museum’s Lee Gallery, along with a companion video that chronicles the efforts of the Carabinieri. The exhibition is part of “2013—Year of Italian Culture,” a series of events that celebrates the best of Italian arts and culture in more than 50 cities and 80 participating institutions across the US. Supporting sponsorship from Friends of the Italian Cultural Center of Boston. Presented with additional support from the Cordover Exhibition Fund and the MFA Associates/MFA Senior Associates Exhibition Endowment Fund. Lent by the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche/Soprintendenza per i Beni Storici, Artistici ed Etnoantropologici delle Marche/Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo. In cooperation with the Comando Carabinieri per la Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale. Presented under the auspices of the President of the Italian Republic’s “2013—Year of Italian Culture in the United States,” designed to enhance the close bonds between Italy and the United States.
Admired today for creating some of 15th-century Italy’s most treasured frescoes and altarpieces, Piero was a brilliant mathematician as well as a painter. Known as an early master of geometry, his style is marked by the geometric elegance of his settings, the calm and nobility of his monumental figures and a masterly handling of light. The Senigallia Madonna, nearly 2 feet by 2 feet in size, shows the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child with two attending angels. Given its format and subject, this picture would have been intended for private devotion. Its name comes from the port city near Urbino in Italy, where it was first noted in a church in the 19th century. The painting is normally on display in the Italian museum, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, located in the Ducal Palace (Palazzo Ducale) in Urbino.
With only a handful of works by Piero in American museums, the Senigallia Madonna exhibition is a rare opportunity to see what is believed to be the Tuscan artist’s last painting. Other Piero works in Massachusetts are the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s detached fresco of the hero Hercules as a youth, and in Williamstown, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s Virgin and Child with Four Angels, likely an altarpiece. The MFA also displays other important paintings from 15th-century Italy that provide context for the Senigallia Madonna, including Giovanni di Paolo’s Madonna of Humility (about 1442), Fra Angelico’s Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints Peter, Paul and George, Four Angels, and a Donor (about 1446–49) and Botticelli’s Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist (about 1500), all in gallery 219.
For more information, visit mfa.org or call 617.267.9300.