Nuove ricerche sulla pala di Pesaro di Marco Zoppo

The focus of this essay is on the vicissitudes of the Pesaro altarpiece by Marco Zoppo, of which the main panel is in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. The grand work, executed in 1471, was made for the high altar of the church of the Observant Franciscans, and was almost certainly commissioned by Alessandro Sforza, Lord of Pesaro. During the 1500s, however, the painting was moved to the Observants’ new church, financed by Duke Guidobaldo II della Rovere to replace the earlier, destroyed building. Zoppo’s altarpiece remained in the new church until the early 1800s, when it was dismembered and dispersed. Substantial objections are made here to the hypothetical reconstruction of the work by Lilian Armstrong (1976), subsequently reformulated by Peter Humfrey (1993), with special reference to panels which may have formed part of the predella, but which appear to have little relation to the Pesaro altarpiece. As regards one of these, the celebrated Severed Head of John the Baptist in the Museo Civico, Pesaro, the attribution to Giovanni Bellini is once again put forward.