This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth in Urbino of Paul Volponi (1924- 2024)writer and poet, politician, PCI senator and corporate executive, passionate art collector. In Roberto Longhi’s lesson, this passion shines through in the paintings that are now part of the collection of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche: 
they range from Bolognese painting of the fourteenth century to the great Caravaggio and Emilian season of some of the most celebrated artists of the seventeenth 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 Palazzo Ducale in Urbino where the two Volponi donations have also been relocated – the figure of the collector and some aspects of his research, between art and literature.
In this regard, the exhibition will be inaugurated on 18 July 2024 at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino Corporal foxescurated by the Galleria Nazionale delle 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 next January 6, 2025 the exhibition aims to go deeper into the 
investigation into Volponi’s predilection for the seventeenth centurybetween naturalistic research and pictorial virtuosity. In fact, visitors will find themselves in front of some canvases that will allow them to rediscover the themes of ecstatic rapture and physical penitence, of the nude, whether female or male, investigated in the epidermal truth of time that wears away, of still life as a popular truth and at the same time a meditation on existence through a genre that found its maximum
conceptualization in the seventeenth century of color and light as tools for investigating nature and as pictorial counterparts of Volponi’s figurative prose.
Among other things, the concomitance at the Palazzo Ducale of the great exhibition Federico Barocci Urbino. The emotion of modern painting offers the unique opportunity to admire a large portion of Italian painting – and not only – of the 17th century, considered from various points of view.
The exhibition Corporal foxes will unfold through a core of eight pictorial works: in a position of honor for those entering from the great hall of the sixteenth century you can admire the Magdalene in ecstasy (from the lost original by Caravaggio), which is accompanied by the Saint Jerome supported by angels by Rutilio Manetti. On the back walls follow the two still lifes, the popular recipe of a ‘gastronomer’ Battistello and a vanity typical of spiritual exercises on the meaning of time and existence; on the opposite wall a Saint Jerome the Penitent by Lorenzo Gennari taken from the altarpiece of the Civic Art Gallery of Cento, which closes the selection next to a Sophonisba suicide of Guercino’s scope like the one already mentioned Saint Jerome by Gennari. In the centre of the room, to recall two of Volponi’s great passions, an extraordinary Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian of Schedoni (ideally to be reconnected a few meters away to theAlms of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary) it’s a Christ at the Column by Carlo Saraceni, one of the most beloved painters and who is evoked precisely at the end of the Corporal.
These eight works will be added to the other 21 Volponi donations already present in the museum itinerary.; among these we also point out the Sacrifice of Isaac by Mattia Preti, the David contemplating the head of Goliath Guido Reni, The philosopher Origen by Jusepe de Ribera, Plato’s Academy by Salvator Rosa.
It should be noted that all the works present at the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche and coming from the Volponi Collection will be gathered in a handy catalogue, which contains the text by Massimo Raffaeli, available for visitors.
Carlo Franza