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For Paul, with deep admiration and affection
A trip to Osimo, a small picturesque hill town in the Marches about ten miles southeast of Ancona is unlikely to be at the top of any art historian's bucket list. Even the well-travelled Giorgio Vasari, who neglects to mention it even once in the Lives, seems not to have set foot there as it is never referred to in his pioneering account of Italian art. And while in his generous biography of Battista Franco (c. 1510-1561) Vasari is generally well-informed about the artist's oft peripatetic career working in and around Rome, Florence, Urbino and Venice, he overlooked Franco's activity in Osimo entirely.1 And yet Franco produced a significant fourteen-panelled polyptych there for which a considerable number of preparatory drawings can be securely identified, more than for any other free-standing pictorial scheme [Fig. 1]. Considered as a group, these panels and their rather atypical related studies - some once attributed to artists as diverse as Agostino Carracci, Moncalvo and Malosso - published together here for the first time, provide some compelling insights into Franco's mid-career working methods, and at the same time, reinforce his underlying debt to the artists he admired most: Michelangelo, Raphael and Polidoro da Caravaggio.2
Franco worked intermittently around 1544 - c. 1551 in Urbino as court artist to Duke Guidobaldo II della Rovere, decorating the central vault of the main cathedral and designing services of maiolica. From there he travelled about one-hundred kilometres to Osimo in autumn of 1547 to confirm his commitment to execute a polyptych for the main altar of S. Leopardo, a Romanesque-Gothic cathedral located in the centre of the town.3 The contract of 15 September drawn up between 'Battistino de Franchis' and the Confraternity of the Sacraments of Osimo specified most of the subjects to be depicted and in some cases, the pigments to be used.4 His work was intended to replace an earlier polyptych (1418) by the Marchigian painter, Pietro di Domenico da Montepulciano, of similar iconography.5 In total, Franco was to execute fourteen paintings: three large single-figure representations of the Risen Christ and Saints Peter and Paul to be painted expressly with finer pigments ('di colore più fini'), that is, ultramarine, for the pale blue, and red lake,...