G. Benazzi - Abstract

The study of the chapel of San Leonardo, better known as Constantine's Eroli Chapel in the Cathedral of Spoleto, not only returns due attention on the third masterpiece of Umbrian Pintoricchio, made shortly after the Pala dei Fossi di Perugia and shortly before the chapel "bella" (or Baglioni) of Spello, but serves as a meeting place of three artistic personalities whose relationship until now not well analyzed, will be of considerable importance. This is the architect and sculptor Ambrogio di Antonio Barocci, lombard, but citizen of Urbino for his long career in the service of Federico da Montefeltro in the 1470s and 1480s, linked to Giovanni Santi, Raphael's father, who remembers him in his rhymed Chronicle and present at the time of his testament in 1494; by Bernardino di Betto, called Pintoricchio, said to work in the Diocese of Spoleto thanks to the link with the Baglioni, in those years Lords of Spello (belonging to the Spoleto diocese in that period), and the young Raphael, recently orphaned of father and engaged in his extraordinary and rapid artistic training.

Ambrose had an important position in 1491 by the municipality of Spoleto for the construction of the porch in front of the Romanesque cathedral and had frequent contacts with Spoleto until 1504. For bishops Eroli (from Narni and Bishops of Spoleto between mid-15th and mid-16th), Constantine and his nephew Francesco then built two chapels along the right flank of the Cathedral itself, destined to host the burials, stylistically very linked to the Urbino-canons, in particular to the model adopted in the Cappella del Perdono. The date that the frieze, 1497, indicates the year of manufacture, which had to be followed shortly thereafter by the assignment given to the pictorial decoration Pintoricchio, perhaps between 1498 and 1499.

It is therefore most probable that the young Raphael, extraordinary artist, being already at Spoleto in the wake of his friend-guardian Barocci and intent to develop under the guidance of his early interest for architectural construction and the use of space in painting, have here entertained the first reports with Pintoricchio, establishing with the perugian painter that collaboration that not only had to hack into his training and to open the doors in Perugia for commissions baglionesche, but also motivate the reason never adequately understood before, the collaboration between the young graphics of Urbino and the master perugino, both for the frescoes in the Piccolomini library in Siena that Pala della Fratta, you retain the well-known drawings which are without any doubt the hand of Raphael.