Historic Da Vinci work loaned from Russia to Italy for UNESCO initiative

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Renaissance master Leonardo Da Vinci never visited the Italian town of Fabriano when he was alive.

But 500 years after his death, part of him will finally make the trip when one of his earliest and most elusive paintings will be exhibited there.

The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg will loan its copy of the Benois Madonna to Fabriano, a town of around 30,000 residents in the Marches, a sparsely populated region in central Italy.

The town is best known for its history of producing high-quality artisanal paper, which made it one of five municipalities in Italy to be declared "creative cities" by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

That designation was key in the town's exhibit of the Benois Madonna, a small work thought to be first painting Leonardo produced after leaving the studio of his teacher, Verrocchio. It dates to 1478, when Leonardo was 26 years old.

"The painting is a magnificent work from a young Leonardo on his way to becoming one of the most important artists to ever live," Carlo Bertelli, an art historian who will curate the exhibit in Fabriano, told Xinhua.

The display in Fabriano required a great deal of work to assure the safety during its transport and exhibition of the painting at the small Pinacoteca Civica art gallery, as well as proper temperature and lighting to make sure the 541-year-old work does not suffer from environmental conditions.

All told, the painting will spend two months in Italy, split between Fabriano and the nearby Umbrian city of Perugia. The loan is part of a wider UNESCO "creative cities" conference that will take place in Fabriano next month.

The selection of Fabriano for the Leonardo exhibit as well for the UNESCO conference was unexpected.

"It was a surprise, even for me," Bertelli quipped, noting that the town has no historical connection to Leonardo during the artist's lifetime.

But to Michail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage, the selection of Fabriano makes sense: "In Italy there are no towns that are not worthy of hosting great works of art," Piotrovsky said in a statement. "It is dotted with villages that house unique artistic treasures."

The plan got underway after a conversation last year between poet and writer Maria Francesca Merloni, UNESCO's goodwill ambassador for the "creative cities" initiative and Maurizio Cecconi, general secretary for the Hermitage Foundation in Italy.

"Francesca Merloni had the idea, and I went to the Hermitage with it and to our delight they said OK," Cecconi said in an interview.

"Of all the various initiatives in Italy to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death, this may be the most intriguing," Cecconi said.

The painting traveled to Russia for the first time in the 1790s, as part of the collection of an art collector called Aleksey Korsakov.

Over the next hundred years it was sold and eventually inherited by the Benois family, which lent the painting their name. It was then acquired by the Heritage using money from Czar Nicholas II in 1914, and in the 105 years since then it has left the collection only three times: to Paris in 1935, to three U.S. cities in 1979, and to Florence in 1984.

"The Hermitage has been very selective about where the painting can go," Bertelli said. "They said no to Milan for an exhibition in 2016, but they said yes to Fabriano in 2019."

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