The National Gallery of the Marche , from 31 October 2019 to 13 April 2020, unveils 147 refined examples of Italian Renaissance majolica, coming from the largest private collection in the sector in the world.

A collection of the highest level belonging to a cultured collector who has allowed his treasure to be exhibited at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, in conjunction with the great exhibition "Raphael and the friends of Urbino" promoted by the National Gallery of the Marche and which can be admired at the Palazzo Ducale from 3 October 2019 to 19 January 2020.

Each of the 147 majolicas testifies, at very high levels, how the great Italian Renaissance season has reverberated on every artistic form and, specifically, in that of majolica. Technique, or rather art, which fully expresses the aesthetic research, the cultural climate, but also the modus vivendi, which make Italy and its artists, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the cultural beacon of the West.
As early as the seventeenth century, in European countries, sixteenth-century Italian majolica becomes a real passion for collecting and, to the historiated one, to be considered an aspect of Renaissance painting in its own right, is associated with the name of the great painter from Urbino: in English Raphael ware.
And Raphael ware is also the title of this fascinating exhibition. To curate it, under the direction of Peter Aufreiter, are Timothy Wilson and Claudio Paolinelli.

Following the Renaissance taste for figurative decoration, the majolica painters - between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century - began to cover every available surface of their objects, with histories of all sorts. The compositions can be original inventions of the same master potters or echo those of the major arts, and again, be extracted from woodcuts or engravings.