Ferruccio Mengaroni – The Last Renaissance Artist

In 2025, exactly 150 years have passed since the birth of Ferruccio Mengaroni (1875-1925), and the centenary of his death also occurs: therefore a very important year to celebrate one of the undisputed protagonists of ceramic art that, with his individuality, inserted himself perfectly in the historicism of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

A multifaceted figure, rebellious genius and man of singular talent, he interprets the historiated of the Renaissance taking inspiration from the ceramics of Domenico Mazza’s collection, preserved in the city museum, often reviving them like they were originals from the sixteenth century.
Ceramist, bricklayer and painter, he studied and experimented with skill the secrets of the fifteenth-sixteenth century’s majolica, and even reproduced its metallic reflections, following the techniques of ancient ceramists.

The exhibition displays over one hundred works of Mengaroni and his workshop, coming from the Civic Museum of Palazzo Mosca and private collectors. It’s a consistent selection taken from his collection – constituted by 176 works – that the Municipality of Pesaro bought in 1937 at the total amount of 80.000 lire, paid in 5 annual installments, that arrived at the museum on the 14th of June 1938.
The only work that doesn’t belong to this lot is the majolica roundel depicting the Medusa, donated subsequently to the Administration by the Mengaroni Workshop.
Under the request of the then-director Gian Carlo Polidori, the monumental sculpture was transferred from the Technical Institute Bramante to the Ducal Palace, then museum headquarters. In June 1960 it was then placed in the atrium of Palazzo Mosca, the new residence of the Civic Museum – where it still welcomes visitors with its terrifying forceful expression.

At the CAME (Ceramiche Artistiche Mengaroni), one of the three museums of the Mengaroni Art High School, the public can instead admire the other artifacts of the Civic Museum that came from the ceramist’s workshop.

Mengaroni’s eclectic virtuosity emerges from his every creation: capable of combining the rules of the renaissance schools of art, he gives shape to a stylistic and chromatic repertoire worthy of the ‘last great Renaissance artist’, as Gian Carlo Polidori describes him.

His worship of the sixteenth and seventeenth century painters and the classical world, combined with his mastery of technical means, brought him to create masterpieces such as The Triumph Of Caesar – taken from 9 great canvases that Andrea Mantegna created between 1486 and 1492 for the Gonzagas, the panel with the Battle Of Massenzio from the Vatican Rooms of Giulio Romano and the big amphora with the Last Judgement from Michelangelo’s fresco on the Sistine Chapel.