Curated by Luigi Gallo, Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari, and Yuri Primarosa, and organized in collaboration with the National Galleries Barberini Corsini of Rome, the exhibition showcases the fully modern flair of the young painter through a selection of 56 paintings. Before his kind in Urbino, the city frequented by the young Cantarini, the exhibition is also an opportunity to celebrate the entry, into the collections of Palazzo Ducale, of the works of the Pesarese, which, after the deposit of the collection of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Pesaro and the two large altarpieces arrived from the Pinacoteca di Brera with the project 100 works returning home, has been enriched with a further nucleus of works, thanks to the loan agreement signed with Intesa Sanpaolo, including also five paintings by Cantarini.

The exhibition aims to present to the public a selection of works by the Pesarese, whose pictorial corpus - significantly increased - will be further augmented for the occasion by unpublished works from public and private collections. Thanks to prestigious loans from Italian and European museums, important works by Cantarini housed in the historical settings of Palazzo Ducale, recently rearranged, will be juxtaposed for the first time with numerous masterpieces by the painter and contemporary masters, in order to present to the public the entire artistic career of the painter in its context.

The exhibition project aims to delve into aspects of Cantarini's artistic production that are still little known: his early activity in his homeland, his relationships with the Barberini family and in particular with the cardinal legate Antonio Barberini junior, the functioning of his workshop, and, in the background, his relationship with Guido Reni in Bologna, marked by the dispute following the Transfiguration of Our Lord commissioned by the Barberini in 1637 for the church of Forte Urbano in Castelfranco. While Montefeltro disappeared from the horizon of history under the assault of the Medici first and of Urbano VIII Barberini later, the Pesarese developed an extraordinarily innovative language, the result of his Marche training under the influence of Raphael and Barocci, combined with the Renian model learned in Bologna between around 1630 and 1639 and the study of antiquity to which he dedicated himself in the Roman biennium framed within the Barberini household team (1640-1642). His original synthesis of classicism and naturalism, attributable to his return to Bologna following Guido's death in 1642 and the Barberini's defeat marked by the war of Castro in 1641 and the pope's death in 1644, closed a glorious era, marked by new horizons. The Roman stay presented itself as a sort of return to the grand style of the Bolognese, and back in Bologna, Simone devoted himself greatly to the invention and elaboration of the project. His language, which became a true manner, did not only look at the courtly models of the Urbino champions but opened up to more updated stimuli, coming from Rome and Bologna.