Il concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale : indagini sul programma iconografico del Tempietto del Palazzo Ducale di Urbino con un'ipotesi di ricostruzione virtuale

The pictorial cycle originally housed in the so-called Tempietto delle Muse in Federico da Montefeltro’s Ducal Palace in Urbino (the oldest attestation of the iconographic representation of the Muses as musicians within a courtly context), visualizes the celebratory theme of music as a mirror of the harmony realized by the Duke during his reign, representing, at the same time, the praise of the ducal "musicality" and that of his favorite musical instruments and repertories. There is no doubt that this sophisticated iconographic project was elaborated within an humanistic neoplatonic celebratory program, but its reconstruction is complicated by the lack of documents concerning its sources and the original number and disposition of the paintings, partly lost. On the basis of an in-depth analysis of the pictorial cycle’s 'iconographic genealogy’, the Author proposes an original global interpretation of the decorative programme and a new hypothesis to identify the iconographic sources of the lost paintings and their possible disposition. To support these hypotheses, the essay includes also a virtual reconstruction of the pictorial cycle, "relocating” inside the Tempietto both the surviving and the missing paintings.