Ducal Palace of Urbino
— two towers, and the valley falling away behind them.
Not only on a wall.
“The Renaissance palace Federico da Montefeltro raised on the hill at Urbino, the one a courtier later called a city in the form of a palace. The twin towers of its west front face away from the streets, out toward the Marche countryside, the way the duke's small study turned its back on the town. Inside, the studiolo is barely larger than a closet, its lower walls inlaid with wood that pretends to be open cupboards and half-shut lattice doors. People climb the hill for Piero della Francesca's Flagellation and stay for the quiet. The light through the loggia does most of the talking.
Ducal Palace of Urbino, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Ducal Palace stands at the top of Urbino, a walled hill town in the Marche, the region on Italy's Adriatic side, in the province of Pesaro and Urbino. Duke Federico da Montefeltro began building it around 1454, enlarging an older palace into the seat of one of the Renaissance's great courts. The town sits roughly 35 kilometres inland from the coast at Pesaro, reached by winding road through the Marche hills; Urbino has no railway station of its own. Since 1998 the historic centre of Urbino, the palace at its core, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The palace now houses the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche.
What makes the building famous is less its size than its proportion. After 1465 Federico brought in the Dalmatian architect Luciano Laurana to give the palace its courtyard and its western front, the Facciata dei Torricini, where two slender round towers frame a stack of loggias looking out over the valley. Laurana's arcaded courtyard, with its even rhythm of columns in pale stone and brick, is often cited as one of the purest statements of early Renaissance architecture. Francesco di Giorgio Martini carried the work on after Laurana left, and the young Donato Bramante, born nearby at Fermignano, is thought to have learned from what he saw here. The effect is calm rather than grand.
The palace is open as the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, one of the most important collections of Renaissance painting in Italy. It runs Tuesday through Sunday, from about 8:30 in the morning until just after 19:00, and closes on Mondays, 25 December, and 1 January. The rooms hold Piero della Francesca's Flagellation of Christ and his Madonna di Senigallia, Raphael's La Muta, and Paolo Uccello's predella of the Desecrated Host. The single space people remember is the studiolo, Federico's study of about 3.6 by 3.4 metres, its lower walls covered in intarsia, inlaid wood that fakes open cupboards, a caged bird, and a half-shelved lute in convincing perspective. Portraits of great thinkers by Joos van Wassenhove once hung above them.