Previously scheduled for 2020 on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, the exhibition is a tribute to the figures of the artist and of Angelo Colocci, both born in the Marche region and both, for different reasons, celebrated representatives of the Italian Renaissance.

The exhibition was created with the aim of highlighting the relationship between Raphael and the humanist from Jesi, Angelo Colocci, a figure with vast intellectual interests who was, in the first thirty years of the 16th century, in Rome, one of the reference points for the great artists that moved around within the papal court, antique dealers, poets, scholars of the language and lovers of science and cosmology.

The works
The exhibition – arranged in the new premises of “Sale Betto Tesei”, named after the artist from Jesi and inaugurated for Palazzo Pianetti exhibit – will allow visitors to enter Colocci’s universe, a paradigm of an intellectual, artistic and human context that contributed to giving shape and substance to the civilization of the Renaissance.

Here then, under the eyes of visitors, Colocci’s antiquarian interests, linked to the re-discovery of the ancient world, take shape thanks to the display of works from the Roman period coming from important museum institutions. Among these, it will be possible to admire the funerary stela of the Aebutii of the 1st century A.D., coming from the Capitoline Museums in Rome and the Menologium rusticum Colotianum, a type of Roman agricultural calendar inspired by the movements of the stars, borrowed from the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Also on display will be the sculpture called the Sleeping Ariadne from the Archaeological Museum of Florence, currently located in the Uffizi Galleries. This sleeping nymph was originally located in Colocci’s garden in Rome and it represented the poetic inspiration that was practiced in that place.

The multimedia itinerary
However, it will be with the most advanced means of multimedia and the so-called “immersive” technology, the core of the entire exhibition and its characterizing feature, that we will try to present this cultural climate in which Raphael and Colocci lived and collaborated. In particular, the famous School of Athens from the cycle of frescoes in the Room of the Segnatura will come to life, through engaging holographic creations, enhancing it as a programmatic declaration, a screenplay for images of a program of cultural, urban, monumental and therefore political renovation of the Rome of the popes in the sign of the appropriation of the legacy of the ancients.

Partnership
The exhibition was organized by the Municipality of Jesi in collaboration with the Vatican Museums, the Polytechnic University of Marche and with the support of the National Committee for the Celebration of the 500th anniversary of the death of Raffaello Sanzio, the Region of Marche and the Cariverona Foundation.

Curators: Giorgio Mangani, Francesco Di Teodoro, Ingrid Rowland, Vincenzo Farinella and Paolo Clini