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From 15 March to 15 June 2025, the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia will be hosting the exhibition Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna. Nature in Art, between Fra Beato Angelico, Leonardo and Corot, on the occasion of the eighth centennial of the composition of the Canticle of the Sun by Saint Francis of Assisi. Not only one of the very first works of poetry in old Italian, it was also the first expression of a new relationship with Nature, to which the saint spoke for the first time in terms of intimacy, in an ecological ideal, in the etymological sense of the term, that was to exert an incredible influence on art from the thirteenth century onwards.

Curated by Costantino D’Orazio, Director of the National Museums of Perugia – Umbria Regional Directorate of National Museums, together with Veruska Picchiarelli and Carla Scagliosi, art historians responsible for the collections at the National Gallery of Umbria, and held under the patronage of the Region of Umbria and of the Municipality of Perugia, with the support of the National Committee for the Celebrations of the Eighth Centennial of the Death of Saint Francis of Assisi and a contribution from the Perugia Foundation, the exhibition will present more than eighty works, comprising paintings, drawings, etchings, sculptures and printed volumes by some of the most famous artists from Italian and European art history, such as Pisanello, Michelino da Besozzo, Paolo Uccello, Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Leon Battista Alberti, Albrecht Dürer, Lorenzo Lotto, Dosso Dossi, Giambologna, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Domenichino, Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Giambattista Piranesi, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and many more, whose masterpieces are milestones that mark the crucial changes in how the figurative arts tackled and reflected man’s relationship with Nature in the course of the centuries.

The aim is to furnish a profound, evocative account of the diverse nuances with which Creation has been observed by human sensitivity and interpreted in artistic vision.