The story
The great altarpiece in Pesaro's civic museum is missing its top. Giovanni Bellini, the Venetian master, painted this Coronation of the Virgin for the church of San Francesco in Pesaro, sometime between the early 1470s and the early 1480s. Christ crowns Mary on a throne set outdoors, with Saints Peter, Paul, Jerome and Francis around them, and the open back of the throne frames a fortress on a hill. In 1797, during the French occupation, the crowning panel with the dead Christ was separated and sent to Paris. The sculptor Antonio Canova recovered it in 1815, but it went to Rome, and it is still in the Vatican picture gallery.
The rest stayed in Pesaro and now hangs in Palazzo Mosca, an old noble residence in the centre of town that houses the civic museums. Two smaller Bellini panels keep it company, a God the Father and a round Head of Saint John the Baptist, though some scholars give that small, grim tondo to the painter Marco Zoppo instead. Guido Reni's Fall of the Giants hangs in the same picture gallery.
The other half of the museum is ceramics. Its cases hold the painted narrative maiolica made in the 16th century across the old Duchy of Urbino, in workshops at Urbino, Casteldurante, Gubbio and Pesaro itself.
