Federigo da Montefeltro and Urbino
Though he had begun life as an energetic mercenary soldier, writes Alan Haynes, the Duke of Urbino became a celebrated humanist and a generous patron of contemporary art and learning.
Urbino was, and remains, a small, isolated hill town in the Italian Marches, most usually approached by a journey across the silent thick-wooded Apennines from Florence. For some fifty years it was the centre of an astonishing cultural dream - a dream that survives most palpably in the palace built by a remarkable mercenary noble - a palace that becomes the cynosure of attention for anyone arriving from Tuscany, long before it is reached, of golden bricks and white stone.
Begun in the fourteen-fifties, and built from the huge profits of war, it expresses most potently and monumentally, yet with a degree of intimacy, the character of its creator, Federigo da Montefeltro.
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