Federico da Montefeltro’s Studiolo measures just over twelve square metres, three metres sixty by three thirty-five, and it is the smallest room in the Ducal Palace of Urbino. It is also the one that says most about the man who had it built. As soon as you walk in, the walls seem lined with half-open cupboards, musical instruments propped at an angle and books left open, and none of those objects really exists: they are wood inlays that since 1476 have faked a depth the room does not have.
The Studiolo reopened on 30 May 2025, after a restoration funded by the PNRR that had kept it closed for several months. Of the portraits of famous men that once ran above the inlays, half remain in Urbino: the other half are in the Louvre, and in the room they are replaced by high-definition reproductions.
Opening hours and tickets are in Ducal Palace of Urbino and the National Gallery of the Marche, and the Flagellation and the Ideal City have an article of their own, Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation and the Ideal City in Urbino. Here we stay in the Studiolo.
Why, once the restoration was over, did architects and art historians start quarrelling over an entablature?
A room of wood that pretends to be full of other rooms
Every wall of the Studiolo is divided into two bands. In the lower band, exactly at the height of your own gaze, the inlays reproduce half-open choir stalls: real-looking objects seem to rest inside, a squirrel, a cage with a parrot, musical instruments such as the lute and the clavichord, clocks, astrolabes, books closed or open halfway through a page. Raise your eyes and you find the upper band, painted but no longer inlaid, where the sequence of portraits of famous men once ran. Above it all, a gilded coffered ceiling carries the ducal coats of arms and an inscription dating the completion of the work to 1476: tilt your head back and you are reading the room’s date of birth.
The technique that makes the illusion possible is called intarsia: woods of different species, each with its own natural tone, cut and fitted together with millimetric precision to build shadows, volumes and vanishing points without a single brushstroke of colour. What you take for a painted shadow is therefore a darker wood, chosen and fitted into that exact spot. It is a process as slow as painting, and harder to correct: a wrong cut in the wood cannot be covered with a second layer.
The effect, once you are standing inside it, is not decorative in a weak sense. The half-open cabinets seem to genuinely contain what they show, to the point that generations of visitors have tried to open them before realising they are flat surfaces: if you feel the urge to reach out a hand, you are in excellent company. It is the highest point Renaissance intarsia ever reached in Italy, and it remains the reason this tiny room draws visitors every year in numbers out of all proportion to its size.
Three names, maybe four, for a single commission in wood
Who really cut this wood? The documented name is Baccio Pontelli, a Florentine architect and inlay master active in Urbino between 1474 and 1476, to whom scholars attribute the actual execution of the inlays together with the workshop of the brothers Benedetto and Giuliano da Maiano, credited also with the coffered ceiling.
When it comes to the drawings those inlays were made from, certainty drops. Some scholars have proposed Sandro Botticelli as the author of the cartoons for the allegories of the theological virtues, others have seen the hand of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, the Sienese architect already at work in the palace, above all in the abstract geometries and the inlaid clock; others again have brought in the young Donato Bramante, to whom some scholars also attribute the room’s overall design. None of these attributions has gathered lasting consensus: they remain hypotheses, supported by stylistic comparison with other works by these authors, not by payment documents that would fix them with certainty.
Keep that in mind precisely because the Studiolo is often described as a work with clearly defined outlines. It is not: it is the result of a Florentine workshop that carried out a project whose intellectual authorship remains, after more than five centuries of study, a matter of hypothesis more than certainty. If you go looking for a label crediting these designs to a single name, you will not find one, and not through an oversight: as the scholarship stands, nobody can write that label.
A programme written in inlay, not in words
Why would a condottiere who had made arms his trade fill the most private room of his palace with books, musical instruments and symbols of learning, instead of trophies of war? Because the Studiolo was not meant to show the visitor who Federico da Montefeltro was in battle, but who he wanted to be once the door closed behind him.
Look for it on the north wall, the line that explains all the rest: an inlaid scroll carries a verse from the ninth book of the Aeneid, virtutibus itur ad astra, through virtue one reaches the stars. It is the declared key to the whole programme, and once you have read it, it changes the way you look at the walls around you. Below the band of objects, in a series of separate panels, are inlaid the duke’s personal devices, the heraldic symbols through which he translated his own moral qualities into images. The objects in the inlays are not chosen at random: musical instruments and books point to the liberal arts, the cabinet with the armour and the military insignia recalls the profession of arms that the duke’s wealth came from, and the coexistence of the two worlds in the same room is, itself, the message.
Twenty-eight famous men, and today only fourteen remain in Urbino
Above the inlays, originally, ran the sequence of portraits of famous men: twenty-eight panels painted between 1473 and 1476, depicting ancient philosophers, fathers of the Church, poets and contemporary scholars chosen as ideal models of knowledge. The commission went to Justus of Ghent, a Flemish painter documented at the court of Urbino in those same years, who, according to research by the National Gallery in London, designed the entire series and carried out most of the preparatory drawings. The completion of several panels is attributed to Pedro Berruguete, a Spanish painter also active in Urbino: an attribution that remains open, though, because the signed works by Berruguete that have come down to us show, according to the same London research, a different and less refined style than that of the Famous Men, to the point that the real extent of his involvement in the series has never been established with certainty.
The cycle never returned whole to Urbino. In 1633, when the Montefeltro dukedom passed to the Papal States, the papal legate cardinal Antonio Barberini had the panels taken away, cutting them apart from one another and erasing much of the lettering that once identified their subjects. In 1861 Napoleon III bought fourteen of those panels from the Barberini collection, and in 1863 they entered the Louvre Museum, where they remain today. The other fourteen returned to Italy only in 1934, thanks to an agreement with the same Barberini family, and since then have been on display at the National Gallery of the Marche, on the Ducal Palace route.
The twenty-eight names, read in their original order, show how broad Federico’s frame of reference was: Plato and Aristotle, the fathers of the Church Gregory the Great, Jerome, Ambrose and Augustine, the scientists Ptolemy, Euclid and Hippocrates, the poets Homer, Virgil, Dante and Petrarch, jurists and theologians such as Bartolus de Saxoferrato and Thomas Aquinas, down to biblical figures such as Moses and Solomon. It is not a gallery of classics alone: among the twenty-eight also appear contemporaries or near-contemporaries of Federico, such as cardinal Bessarion and popes Pius II and Sixtus IV, a sign that the duke placed ancient authority and that of his own century on the same level.
Look up and it would be natural to assume you are facing all twenty-eight original portraits, lined up as Federico saw them. You are not: that is why the band of portraits above your head is not the original series, fourteen panels are authentic, the other fourteen are high-definition reproductions of the ones that remain in Paris, added precisely in the 2025 refurbishment to visually restore the unity of a cycle that, physically, will remain divided between two countries. Look along the row before you leave: it is here, and not at the Louvre, that the sequence of twenty-eight can be read whole again.
A studiolo is not a storeroom for books: it is a moral self-portrait
Federico da Montefeltro did not invent the genre. Leonello d’Este, lord of Ferrara, had already had a studiolo decorated at Belfiore in the 1440s, with a programme of Muses painted by some of the leading painters of the age; a few decades later Isabella d’Este would do the same in Mantua, turning her own private room into one of the most ambitious artistic projects of the Italian Renaissance. The idea of a room set apart from the ceremonial life of the palace, reserved for the lord’s reading and meditation, was part, in short, of the custom of the century’s courts, not an isolated invention of Federico’s.
The Urbino studiolo remains, though, the most complete to have come down to us, and it was not even the only one Federico had built: a second studiolo, with a similar inlay programme, decorated his palace in Gubbio. Dismantled in the nineteenth century, it is today reconstructed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and its very existence tells us the Studiolo of Urbino was not an isolated whim, but the expression of an idea the duke cared about enough to repeat in two different cities. If you ever find yourself in New York, go and look for that second room at the Metropolitan: it is the other half of what you are looking at in Urbino, an ocean away.
Federico da Montefeltro assembled one of the largest libraries in Italy after the Vatican’s, with a scriptorium of copyists steadily at work, and brought humanists and artists from across the peninsula to his court. The Studiolo is the physical synthesis of that library, and it is the paradox you take home from this room: it does not hold a single real book, and it still declares, through every inlay and every portrait, which tradition of knowledge its owner meant to belong to. The duke would retire there, according to biographical tradition, to read and discuss with his humanists away from the ceremony of the rooms of state: a private use, consistent with the room’s size, even though no diary or letter of the time describes his days there in detail.
The 2025 project also restored two rooms nobody expected
If you came through Urbino between November 2024 and May 2025, you found this door shut: the Studiolo had been closed since 4 November 2024. The restoration, funded with PNRR money, reopened the room on 30 May 2025, and the group that directed it (the director of the National Gallery of the Marche Luigi Gallo, the architect Francesco Primari, the art historian Giovanni Russo and the restorer Giulia Papini) worked not only on the inlays, but on the duke’s whole apartment around them.
On the inlays, the work dismantled and reassembled the wooden panels following the notes left by Pasquale Rotondi, the superintendent who in the twentieth century had already studied and partly reconstructed the palace, removed nineteenth-century additions that had altered how the room was read, and recovered the original tones of the wood, restoring depth to the perspective built in the 15th century. To complete the upper band with all twenty-eight portraits, the National Gallery of the Marche reached an agreement with the Louvre: the Paris museum supplied high-resolution photographs of the fourteen panels it holds, from which the reproductions were made, now mounted in new panels built specially to hold them. The lighting changed too, and you will notice it as soon as you walk in: a new system in the window opening simulates natural light, while the other rooms of the apartment received new ceiling fixtures.
But the most unexpected discoveries came from the neighbouring rooms, and they are the reason not to walk straight out once you have looked at the inlays. Archival research led by Giovanni Russo made it possible to restore full legibility to the duke’s private latrine, next to the Studiolo, and to correctly reposition the ornamental elements of the monumental washbasin in the nearby bedroom: an apparatus that had been dismantled in the nineteenth century, when the palace became the seat of the prefecture, and then reassembled inconsistently. Guiding the repositioning were the nineteenth-century views drawn by Romolo Liverani, compared against archival documents: philological work that, together with the Studiolo, restored a piece of the court’s daily life that no guidebook covered any more.
An entablature removed, and the dispute that followed
Who decides how a wall designed five centuries ago should look again, when no photograph of the original design has ever existed? That is the question raised in September 2025 by Lorenzo Pagnini, an architectural historian and representative of the Forum Bramante, in a piece published by the Giornale dell’Architettura. Pagnini challenged the removal of the wooden entablature, the architectural element that completed the pilasters above the inlays and that the restoration replaced with a triple band on a dark background: in his view, an intervention that strips the inlays of their original structural logic and that violates the principles of philological restoration set out in Cesare Brandi’s theory. Pagnini also criticised the insertion of floor lighting fixtures into the fifteenth-century terracotta floor, a detail he called better suited to a shop than to a Renaissance room.
The dispute did not stay confined to specialist journals. On 6 February 2026 Agenparl gave the matter national coverage, in an article that recounts together the restoration’s stated results (the light and perspective depth restored to the inlays, according to the National Gallery of the Marche) and the same objections raised months earlier by Forum Bramante. None of the sources consulted for this article records a point-by-point reply from the gallery to Pagnini’s accusations: it remains, for now, an open controversy between those who defend the choice to restore light and legibility to the room and those who consider it an irreversible alteration of a documented Renaissance project. One thing here concerns your trip rather than the debate, so hold on to it: the dispute is about restoration and display choices, not about getting into the room. The Studiolo, latrine and washbasin included, has been open for regular visits since May 2025, and nothing you have read above will stop you walking in.
Practical information
Checked on 5 September 2026. The Studiolo is part of the piano nobile route of the National Gallery of the Marche, inside the Ducal Palace of Urbino, and follows the same hours and the same ticket as the whole museum: there is no separate entrance or fee. The palace opens Tuesday to Sunday and is closed on Mondays. For full hours, prices and how to get there, the reference guide remains Ducal Palace of Urbino and the National Gallery of the Marche.
The PNRR works that affected the Studiolo along with the rest of the piano nobile are finished: the room has been open in full since 30 May 2025, including the duke’s latrine and the monumental washbasin in the room next door. The dispute over the restoration choices, told in this article, involves no restriction on the visit.
If you want to see all twenty-eight portraits of famous men in the original, count on two trips: fourteen are in Urbino, the other fourteen at the Louvre Museum in Paris. In Urbino, since 2025, high-definition reproductions occupy the places left empty by the panels that remain in France.
To fit this visit into the rest of your day in Urbino, together with the Ducal Palace and the Flagellation, the full itinerary is in What to See in Urbino in One Day.
Photo credits: overall view of the Studiolo by BjoernEisbaer (CC BY-SA 3.0), inlay with the duke’s armour by Enric (CC BY-SA 4.0), Wikimedia Commons. The portrait of Saint Gregory the Great is a photographic reproduction of a public-domain painting; the inlay with the armed figure above the clavichord is by Fabrizio Garrisi (CC0), both from Wikimedia Commons.
