Anyone leaving the courtyard of honour of the Ducal Palace, still holding the Flagellation and the Studiolo in their eyes, would hardly imagine that ten minutes away on foot, under the walls of the Albornoz Fortress, there is a single room where two painters from the Marche left, in 1416, one of the best-preserved late-Gothic cycles in the region. It is not a museum, it has no imposing ticket office, and in fact most visitors to Urbino never set foot inside.
One useful thing before you set out: the oratory is open every day, no closing day appears in the sources consulted, and there is no need to book. It is therefore a stop you can fit into a day devoted to the palace without much planning.
This article is not a guide to the Ducal Palace, which instead is in Ducal Palace of Urbino and the National Gallery of the Marche: here we stay inside a single room, reading a fresco cycle that few travel guides tell in full, and crossing through the door next door, where a second oratory hides a life-size stucco nativity.
A hospital for pilgrims, before it was ever an oratory
The building was born almost a century before the Ducal Palace, and it was not born as a chapel of art but as a work of charity. In 1365 the Lateran Chapter authorised Ugolino Finelli, a member of the Confraternity of San Giovanni Battista, to build the oratory on the site of a small hospital that already stood there, taking in pilgrims and caring for the sick: the work went on until 1393, promoted by the same lay confraternity that gives the building its name. When Federico da Montefeltro began the building site of the Ducal Palace in 1454, the oratory had already existed for more than sixty years.
In that attached hospice the Blessed Pietro Spagnoli spent his last years in prayer, a member of the Gerolamini congregation who died on 15 June 1415, just as the Salimbeni were working on the walls nearby. His remains, after two exhumations between the 17th and 18th centuries, still rest today in a crystal urn beneath the high altar, in front of which rises the Crucifixion painted the following year. Over the centuries the original confraternity merged with two others: that of Saint James the Apostle in the first half of the 19th century, and that of Saint Anthony Abbot in the 1920s, after their own oratory at Borgo Mercatale was demolished.
Of all this, today what remains is a single rectangular room, covered by a timber-beamed ceiling, without the architectural grandeur of the nearby Ducal Palace. No sequence of rooms, no hierarchy of chambers as in the Montefeltro palace: the walls are the exhibition, and they should be read as you read an open book, from bottom to top and from one side to the other.
On the Crucifixion wall, an inscription fixes the signature and the year
What exactly does the painted inscription say, on the back wall, beneath the great Crucifixion? It gives, in Latin and with a few lost letters that scholars have reconstructed, the names of the two authors: «Laurentius da Sancto Severino et Jacobus frater eius», Lorenzo da San Severino and Jacopo his brother. It is the most important joint signature the two brothers left: according to the studies that have reconstructed their catalogue, it is one of only two works signed by both of them together.
The entry the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani devotes to Lorenzo Salimbeni places the work between 1415, when it began, and July 1416, when it was finished: not a single date, then, but a year and a half of work that the inscription on the wall seals at the end. For Lorenzo it is also, in all likelihood, his last major project: he died before October 1420, the date on which his wife Vanna is recorded as a widow in a document, and no work securely dated after Urbino is attributed to him.
Two brothers who painted as if they were a single hand
The pair who sign this wall come from the same town in the Marche. Lorenzo was born in San Severino Marche in 1373 or 1374, the son of a wool merchant, and his training combines influences from late 14th-century Emilian painting (in particular the circle of Jacopo Avanzi) with the Umbrian-Marche tradition and a taste for manuscript illumination. Jacopo, of whom less is known, was born around 1370-1380, served as an adviser to the town council in his native San Severino and outlived his brother by at least six years, to 1426.
The two sign the Urbino project jointly, but telling one hand from the other remains difficult: the formal homogeneity of their catalogue, which scholars have repeatedly pointed out (among them Mauro Minardi, author of the most complete monograph on the two brothers’ work), suggests work carried out almost in unison, even though Lorenzo, according to prevailing criticism, remains the leading artistic personality. The result is a style belonging to the international Gothic, the courtly and cosmopolitan current that in those same decades ran through the Italian courts alongside painters such as Gentile da Fabriano: precious colours, surfaces enriched with glass and metallic applications that imitate the sheen of illuminations from beyond the Alps, and a figurative sophistication that here, in Urbino, comes with an uncommon psychological intensity for the genre.
Gentile da Fabriano is as much from the Marche as the Salimbeni, and shares a generation with them more than a workshop: they were born in the same region, in the same years, and learned to translate into the same courtly language the courts that had put them to work. It is a useful reminder for anyone who thinks of the early 15th-century Marche as a province waiting for the Florentine Renaissance: for a couple of decades, before Piero della Francesca, this region speaks the international language of Europe’s Gothic courts, and the room you are looking at is one of its best-preserved witnesses.
The story of the Baptist runs for seventeen scenes
On the right wall, the one you meet on entering, the cycle tells the life of Saint John the Baptist in a sequence scholars count at around seventeen episodes, spread over several registers: twelve survive in good condition, another five remain only as fragments. It begins with the Annunciation to Zacharias near the altar, moves through the Visitation and the Nativity of the Baptist, told with an unusual narrative detail for a cycle of this size, and arrives at the preaching to the crowds, the baptism of Christ in the Jordan, the appearance before Herod and finally the burial of the saint’s beheaded body.
It is a story that takes its time to develop everyday details, instead of limiting itself to the canonical moments of the Baptist’s life, and it is precisely here that the Salimbeni’s narrative quality shows itself: the painted architecture, the gestures of secondary figures, the animals and props compose a continuous world, not a succession of isolated icons. The scene of Herod on horseback, in particular, breaks the fixed pattern of preaching-from-a-throne seen in many cycles of the period, and stages instead a sovereign in motion, with an armed retinue behind him, in an almost chivalric register closer to illuminated court manuscripts than to altar painting.
The Crucifixion closes the story on a crowded hill
On the back wall, behind the altar, the cycle reaches its high point in a «populated» type of Crucifixion: a compositional formula that from the 14th century onward had spread precisely for the narrative possibilities it offered, filling Calvary with figures instead of isolating the cross against an empty background. Here you see the two thieves beside Christ, a group of Pharisees and Roman soldiers carrying banners in an almost tournament-like display, Saint Longinus piercing his side, the Virgin fainting supported by the holy women and the Magdalene despairing with a wide gesture of her arms.
It is the scene that sums up everything the room tells: the same chromatic richness of the Baptist cycle, the same attention to the details of costumes and armour, put to the service of the most dramatic moment of the Gospel story. Choosing the crowded type, instead of the more austere composition with a few figures gathered around the cross, is what lets the Salimbeni fill the entire wall with a second story, made of extras, horses and banners, that surrounds without distracting from the dramatic centre of the scene. And it is precisely on this wall, as we have seen, that the two brothers left their joint signature along with the date.
Who painted the final scenes, near the entrance
Who completed the scenes on the left wall and the counter-facade, the ones closest to the entrance? Stylistic analysis, more than any document, assigns these parts not to the Salimbeni brothers but to Antonio Alberti da Ferrara, a painter active in the Marche in the decades after 1416: a different hand, grafted onto the story of the Baptist, which the most recent studies (starting with Minardi’s monograph on the Salimbeni) distinguish with confidence from the core signed and dated by the two brothers.
It is not a minor detail for anyone looking at the room closely: it means the oratory is not a project closed within a single year, but an ensemble grown through later additions around an original nucleus, that of 1416, which nonetheless remains the most important and best documented part of the whole cycle. Unlike the Crucifixion and the Stories of the Baptist, here there is no inscription to confirm it: the attribution to Alberti comes from comparison with his signed works elsewhere in the Marche and in Emilia, not from a document found in this room.
A rare cycle, because the rest of the Salimbeni catalogue has been lost
The Urbino cycle is described as one of the best preserved among the late-Gothic cycles of the Marche, and comparing it with what survives elsewhere of the two brothers’ work explains why. In the Duomo Vecchio of their native San Severino Marche, the Salimbeni signed another cycle, the Stories of Saint John the Evangelist, painted in a chapel under the bell tower: today only detached fragments remain, moved after an earthquake to the city’s civic picture gallery, far from the wall they were designed for. In the church of the Misericordia, also in San Severino, only fragments survive of another of their projects. In Urbino, by contrast, the whole room has come down to us in its original setting.
The credit also goes to a precise modern intervention: between 1972 and 1977 the Superintendency for Artistic and Historical Heritage of the Marche carried out a restoration that removed accretions built up over the centuries, cleaned and restored all the frescoed walls and restored a unified reading of the whole cycle, today protected under the wooden ceiling shaped like an upturned ship’s hull that has covered the room from the start. On the exterior facade, instead, the neo-Gothic look you see today dates from an early-20th-century restoration by Diomede Catalucci: what looks like an intact medieval building is, on the outside, also the result of a genuinely twentieth-century intervention.
Next door, a second oratory hides a life-size stucco nativity
A Mannerist nativity of the full 16th century and a late-Gothic oratory of the early 15th have little in common stylistically, but everything in common as far as the visit goes: the Oratory of San Giuseppe stands next to that of San Giovanni, and is run by a different confraternity, that of San Giuseppe, which completed its construction in 1515. Between 1682 and 1689 the building was almost entirely rebuilt at the expense of Orazio Albani, to fix the damp that was damaging it: of the sixteenth-century oratory, only the chapel that held the nativity survived, spared on purpose from the demolition.
That nativity is the work of the sculptor Federico Brandani (1522/1525-1575), born in Urbino and trained under a maiolica maker before becoming a court artist in the service of Duke Guidobaldo II della Rovere, made between 1545 and 1550. Brandani lined the chapel walls with tuff and pumice stone to recreate the setting of a grotto, and placed inside it the Nativity with life-size stucco figures: the Holy Family, the ox, the donkey and four shepherds in adoration beneath a shelter, while on the ceiling a glory of stucco angels animates the vault. It is considered among the highest achievements of Italian Mannerist sculpture in this genre, and can be visited with the same ticket as the Oratory of San Giovanni.
The same Brandani, until 1560, also worked inside the Ducal Palace: the dome of the chapel of the Perdono and the stuccoed ceiling of the Sala della Preghiera are his, both visible on the National Gallery of the Marche route. It is another thread linking the oratory you have just visited to the nearby palace: the same sculptor left his most celebrated work in a room almost no one seeks out, and a more workaday one in the rooms everyone walks through.
Set side by side, the two rooms tell two different centuries with the same gesture: a Gothic cycle signed by two brothers from the Marche in 1416, and a Mannerist nativity signed by an Urbino sculptor in 1550, both held together by a shared wall and a single ticket. Neither room competes with the scale of the Ducal Palace, and that is probably exactly why so many visitors skip them: there is no facade calling out from a distance, you have to know they are there.
Practical information
Checked in September 2026, cross-checking independent sources. The official site of the Confraternity of San Giovanni (a simple page with a menu, without published hours or prices) does not cover everything on its own.
Tickets. The combined ticket covering both the Oratory of San Giovanni and the adjoining Oratory of San Giuseppe with Brandani’s nativity costs 5 euros. The figure comes from converging secondary sources, not from an official page of the Confraternity: treat it as solid information but not certified at the source. Admission to the Oratory of San Giovanni alone, according to the same sources, costs 2.50 euros.
Booking. No source consulted reports a requirement to book: you visit by showing up on site during opening hours.
Opening hours. The Oratory of San Giovanni Battista is open every day, from 10.00 to 13.00 and from 15.00 to 18.00. The sources consulted report no weekly closing day. Last entry is not given by any source found: it is worth planning your visiting time to be well inside before closing, rather than counting on a margin that is not stated anywhere here.
Getting there. The oratory is on Via Barocci, in the historic centre of Urbino, a few minutes’ walk from the Ducal Palace and at the foot of the Albornoz Fortress.
How long it takes. A careful visit to just the Baptist’s room takes a quarter of an hour; with the Oratory of San Giuseppe next door, the stop grows to a good half hour, time well worth fitting into the same day devoted to the Ducal Palace.
For the full itinerary of that day, with the opening hours of every stop, the reference guide is What to See in Urbino in One Day.
Photo credits: interior of the oratory by Mattis (CC BY-SA 3.0), Crucifixion by Accurimbono, narrative cycle by Helvio ricina, Brandani’s nativity by Stbuccia (CC BY-SA 4.0). All from Wikimedia Commons.
