MASTERPIECE THEATRE
The fight over a Renaissance fresco is pitting the Catholic Church against a Tuscan town,
MONTERCHI, ITALY— There wasn’t much suspense when the Monterchi city council recently considered the latest request to borrow the Madonna del Parto, this tiny hilltop town’s exquisite 15th-century fresco. The offer came from the Capitoline Museums in Rome, one of Italy’s most prestigious settings for art. And the council’s answer was no. No was also the response given to organizers of a current exhibition dedicated to Piero della Francesca, the Renaissance master who painted the Madonna. Never mind that the organizers offered several hundred thousand euros just to rent the fresco for a few months — money the city council needed to help build a proper museum to display the artwork.
“We cannot lose possession of the Madonna, even for a minute,” said Alfredo Romanelli, the mayor of Monterchi. “Anyone who wants to see the Madonna has to come to Monterchi.”
No one disputes that the Madonna is a masterpiece of the Renaissance. What is disputed is almost everything else.
For decades, the Madonnahas been entangled in the type of distinctly Italian bureaucratic standoff that can bend time as well as logic. The contested issue is how and where the fresco should be displayed. The Roman Catholic Church is involved. So is the ministry of culture. There has been litigation. There have been government committees. There have been TV specials.
What there has not been, though, is a conclusive, accepted answer to a central question: Who owns the Madonna?
“That is a problem,” said Paola Refice, a government art historian who is a local point person on the dispute for the ministry of culture. “No one knows.”
Situated among the medieval hilltop villages dotting the eastern boundary of Tuscany, Monterchi is a quiet relic of about 2,000 residents, many of whom commute to jobs elsewhere or are pensioners.
The town’s claim to any fame — and its sole source of tourism, attracting about 30,000 annual visitors — is the Madonna, which is displayed inside a retrofitted schoolhouse.
It is not rare to find a Renaissance or medieval Madonna painted in the churches populating the small villages scattered throughout the valley. But the Madonna del Parto is unique as a work of art, as well as for the mystery that shrouds it.
Della Francesca, now regarded as a titan of the Renaissance, is thought to have painted the fresco in the 1450s, possibly in only seven days.
Yet no one knows who commissioned the work. It was painted on a wall of an ancient church on a hill just outside Monterchi. That hill contained a natural spring famous in the pre-Christian era for a pagan fertility cult in which women came to drink the waters. The Catholics later built a church on the hill and maintained the fertility cult during the Middle Ages by dedicating the sanctuary to the “Madonna of the Milk.”
Della Francesca’s Madonna embraces this legacy, depicting the Virgin Mary as visibly pregnant, a controversial rendering for the era.
Even so, a few centuries passed without apparent incident. Then, Catholic prelates donated the church and its grounds to the town of Monterchi in the 18th century, so that the town could build a cemetery.
Romanelli, the Monterchi mayor, said that this moment marked the city’s ownership of the fresco and that townspeople have defended it zealously ever since. When a group of Nazis tried to take the fresco during the Second World War, women rang the church bells and the men rushed in from the fields bearing pitchforks.
“We defended it before,” Romanelli said, “and we defend it now.”
In1991, the Madonnawas removed from the church and taken to Monterchi proper to be restored. It was placed inside a schoolhouse built during the fascist era, with the expectation that it would be returned to the church. But that never happened, as the schoolhouse became a small museum that brought in tourists. A decade passed. Then, in 2003, conflict broke out on two fronts. First, the local Catholic diocese sued Monterchi, claiming ownership of the Madonna and demanding it be returned to the church. Then, the City of Monterchi sued the ministry of culture after the ministry ordered its local office to draft a plan (unrelated to the diocesan lawsuit) to possibly return the fresco to its original locale. Six years of tetchiness followed. Finally, in 2009, Monterchi and the diocese struck a deal to end their litigation: The fresco would be displayed in a convent across the street from the schoolhouse. The diocese would donate the convent to the city. A solution seemed in sight.
Six more years passed. Opinions differed over how the fresco would be displayed, or how to pay for the costly renovations to convert the convent into a museum. Some art historians continued to argue that the Madonna should be returned to where it was created. Yet the original church has since been reduced in size as the cemetery has steadily expanded.
Then, in 2015, an Italian court handed down a ruling on Monterchi’s 2003 litigation against the ministry of culture. “It took 12 years,” said a rueful Refice, the ministry official. The court ruled against moving the Madonna back to the church. The stars seemed aligned to use the convent.
Except there is still plenty of distrust. The mayor says church officials still have not signed important legal documents. Town officials remain suspicious that somehow the Madonna will be snatched away.
“I have nothing to fight about with the people of Monterchi,” Archbishop Riccardo Fontana said. “Nothing at all. They want to keep their Madonna, and they can keep it.”
Indeed, no one is satisfied with the schoolhouse. But no one seems capable of taking the next step. Renovating the convent could cost millions of Euros. Monterchi might raise some of that money by loaning out the Madonna to a major museum, except city officials worry that doing so could bring a legal claim.
Refice said her office was amenable to the convent proposal, but needed a concrete project plan with a budget. Fontana suggested crowdsourcing or seeking foreign investors. Romanelli said legalities must first be clarified.
“We are famous within Tuscany because we have horrible relations with everybody else,” the archbishop joked about the region. “We are fighting, always.”