Examination of the Uomini Illustri: looking for the origins of the portraits in the Studiolo of the Ducal Palace of Urbino. Part I

The 28 portraits of the Uomini Illustri (Famous Men) were ordered by Federico da Montefeltro to decorate his studiolo in Urbino c.1473–1476. Initially the Famous Men were painted on seven panels, with four portraits on each. They are now separated into two groups, 14 in the Musée du Louvre, Paris and 14 in the Ducal Palace of Urbino. No testimony on the context of the creation itself was left and art historians have claimed that the paintings were created by a Flemish painter, Justus of Ghent and finished by a Spanish painter, Pedro Berruguete. This hypothesis has now been reconsidered. A reconstruction of the Urbino studiolo decoration was given by Pasquale Rotondi in 1973, based particularly on iconographical considerations and on a partial material study. New analyses were performed at the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (C2RMF) in 2008, enabling the various modifications that the portraits have undergone over the centuries to be brought to light. The results of the Italo-French collaboration presented in this paper allow hypotheses on the original decoration of the studiolo to be proposed.