A Última Ceia

This was never meant to hang on a wall. It is one face of a processional banner, painted on both sides for the Corpus Domini confraternity of Urbino, who carried it through the streets on feast days. The Last Supper is on this side and the Resurrection on the other, and Titian painted the thing in Venice in the early 1540s for a church in Urbino called Santa Maria di Pian di Mercato. That local detail matters now, because almost nothing else by him is left in the city. When the duchy of Urbino passed to the papacy in 1631 and the last Della Rovere heiress married a Medici, the ducal pictures went to Florence. A restoration completed in 2018 lifted the oxidised varnish and brought back the painted frames Titian had put around each scene.