Both the Frick Collection in New York and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg were unable to achieve success and were forced to opt for virtual reconstructions in 2013 and 2018, respectively. The Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, a small but prestigious house museum in Via Manzoni, has succeeded, which since yesterday has been hosting "the meeting of the century", juxtaposing for the first time in over 500 years what remains of Piero della Francesca's Polyptych: eight panels of the more than twenty compartments of which the complex altarpiece that the Renaissance master created between 1454 and 1469 for the church of the Augustinians in Borgo San Marino was composed. The procedure was also commemorated by the two great-granddaughters of collector Henry Clay Frick, who arrived from America to view the masterpiece. "It's a miracle to see the panels side by side," says Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, curator at the Rijksmuseum and curator of the show together with Nathaniel Silver of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Now, for the first time, the Polyptych has been rebuilt in a modest show that will wind up in the art history books".
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