All'ombra di Federico Barocci: progetti e disegni inediti di Muzio Oddi per l'oratorio della Morte a Urbino, con una postilla sulla cattedrale di San Venanzio a Fabriano

This paper examines a substantial group of drawings preserved in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, contained in the album entitled Disegni originali di mano di Muzio Oddi da Urbino. In particular, it focuses on fifteen sheets that, according to the catalogue compiled by Arnold Noach in the 1940s and 1950s — never subsequently revised — were variously attributed to projects and studies by Oddi for the city of Fabriano or for locations broadly situated in northern Italy. A close investigation of these drawings —many executed on both recto and verso — and of Oddi’s activity in his native region has made it possible, on the one hand, to identify those subjects genuinely connected with the Marche town of Fabriano, and specifically with its collegiate church of San Venanzio, rebuilt from 1607 onwards to Oddi’s design; and, on the other hand, to recognize the previously unknown and unexpected architectural role played by the Urbino-born architect in shaping the present configuration of the Oratorio della Morte in Urbino. It was for this very building that, in the same years, the painter Federico Barocci produced the altarpiece of the Crucifix with the Virgin, Saint John, and the Magdalene. Oddi’s authorship, not only of the wooden altar frame housing the painting but also of the church’s stone portal, is confirmed by the exact correspondence of these elements with the designs in Windsor. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, the small temple of the Confraternity of Death thus emerges as a site in which the combined energies of Barocci’s painterly invention and Oddi’s architectural design dramatically assert the visibility of the sacred through the interplay of painting and architecture.