This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Paolo Volponi in Urbino, a writer and poet, politician and business executive, passionate art collector. In Roberto Longhi's lesson, this passion is evident in the paintings that are now part of the collection of the National Gallery of the Marche: they range from Bolognese painting of the 14th century to the great Caravaggesque and Emilian season of some of the most famous artists of the 17th century. The anniversary therefore offers the opportunity to delve deeper - just over a year after the opening of the new exhibition rooms on the second floor of the Ducal Palace of Urbino, where the two Volponi donations have also been relocated - into the figure of the collector and some aspects of his research, between art and literature.

In this regard, on July 18th, the exhibition "Volponi corporale" will be inaugurated at the Ducal Palace of Urbino, curated by the National Gallery of the Marche and set up in spatial continuity with the two exhibition rooms that house the paintings donated respectively by Volponi himself in 1991 and by his wife Giovina Iannello together with their daughter Caterina in 2003.

Until January 6, 2025, the exhibition aims to delve deeper into the investigation of Volponi's predilection for the 17th century, between naturalistic research and pictorial virtuosity. Visitors will be faced with some canvases that will allow them to rediscover the themes of ecstatic rapture and physical penance, of the nude, whether female or male, investigated in the epidermal truth of time that wears out, of still life as popular truth and at the same time meditation on existence through a genre that found its maximum conceptualization in the 17th century, of color and light as tools to investigate nature and as pictorial counterparts of Volponi's figurative prose.

The exhibition "Volponi corporale" will unfold through a nucleus of eight pictorial works: in a place of honor for those entering from the large 16th-century hall, they will be able to admire the Maddalena in estasi (from the lost original by Caravaggio), alongside San Girolamo sorretto dagli angeli by Rutilio Manetti. On the back walls are the two still lifes, the popular recipe of a 'gastronomic' Battistello and a vanitas typical of spiritual exercises on the sense of time and existence; on the opposite wall, a San Girolamo penitente by Lorenzo Gennari taken from the altarpiece of the Civic Pinacoteca of Cento, which closes the selection next to a Sofonisba suicidal in the Guercino style like the aforementioned San Girolamo by Gennari. In the center of the room, evoking two great passions of Volponi, an extraordinary Martirio di San Sebastiano by Schedoni (ideally linked a few meters away to the Elemosina di Sant’Elisabetta d’Ungheria) and a Cristo alla colonna by Carlo Saraceni, a painter among the most beloved and evoked at the end of the Corporale.