MADRID.- More than a century after it was written, a lost essay by the influential Italian art historian Roberto Longhi is being published for the first time by the Museo Nacional del Prado.
The text, devoted to the Castilian painter Pedro Berruguete, appears in El solemnísimo maestro Pedro Berruguete, the fifth volume in the Prado’s Bicentennial Collection. Edited by art historian Tommaso Mozzati, the book brings into print a study that helped launch a major and still unresolved debate about artistic exchange between Spain and Italy during the Renaissance.
Longhi conceived the essay after traveling through Spain in the summer of 1920. During a visit to the Prado, he began to consider the possibility that Berruguete, one of the leading painters active in late 15th-century Castile, had spent an extended period at the court of Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino.
That idea would have important consequences for the way scholars understood Berruguete’s formation and career. It offered a possible explanation for the relationship between his work and the visual culture of the Italian Renaissance, while also raising broader questions about how artists, styles and ideas moved between the two sides of the Mediterranean.
Longhi developed his argument in an extensive essay, examining the connections between Castilian painting and the artistic world of Renaissance Italy. Yet the study was never published during his lifetime. Instead, it remained among the historian’s papers, inaccessible to most scholars.
An unpublished text with a lasting influence
Although the essay itself disappeared from public view, its ideas did not.
Longhi’s students and colleagues in both Italy and Spain circulated and discussed his theory, turning what became known as the “Berruguete case” into one of the most persistent debates in modern art history. More than 100 years after Longhi first proposed it, the question of Berruguete’s possible stay in Urbino continues to occupy an important place in discussions of the painter’s life and development.
The Prado’s publication now allows readers to encounter Longhi’s original reasoning directly rather than through later interpretations and summaries.
The essay also reveals how Berruguete became a test of Longhi’s abilities as a connoisseur—a scholar capable of identifying artistic personalities, relationships and influences through close visual analysis. At the same time, the text moves beyond the attribution of individual works to consider the larger circulation of artists and pictorial models between Spain and Italy.
In this sense, the volume is not only about Berruguete. It also provides insight into the development of Longhi’s own critical thinking and into the methods used by one of the 20th century’s most influential art historians.
Born in 1890, Longhi became a central figure in the study of Italian art. His work combined intense visual observation with a highly personal form of critical writing. The unpublished Berruguete essay offers an early example of that approach, formed through his direct encounter with paintings in the Prado’s galleries.
Reconsidering Pedro Berruguete
Pedro Berruguete, who lived from around 1445 or 1450 until 1503, was one of the most important painters working in Castile at the end of the 15th century.
Longhi’s hypothesis placed the Spanish artist within the sophisticated environment of Federico da Montefeltro’s court in Urbino, one of the major centers of Renaissance culture. By proposing that Berruguete had worked there, Longhi opened a new way of interpreting the combination of Castilian and Italian elements visible in the painter’s work.
The theory also raised wider questions about national schools and artistic identity. Rather than treating Spanish and Italian Renaissance painting as separate traditions, Longhi’s argument suggested a more fluid cultural landscape in which artists and ideas crossed political and geographic boundaries.
According to the Prado, the recovered essay is therefore important not only for specialists in Berruguete, but for anyone interested in the history of European art and in the intellectual development of modern art criticism.
Mozzati’s edition restores a document that had long been known indirectly but had never been available in its original form. Its publication makes it possible to reconsider the arguments that shaped the debate and to measure the distance between Longhi’s first intuition and the scholarship that followed.
A new volume in the Prado’s Bicentennial Collection
El solemnísimo maestro Pedro Berruguete is the fifth title in the Museo del Prado’s Bicentennial Collection. The series explores the history of the institution, its collections and architecture, as well as the museum’s changing administrative and curatorial models.
Published in Spanish in July 2026, the paperback volume contains 168 pages and is edited by Tommaso Mozzati. It is priced at €19 and is available through the Prado shop and its online store.
By bringing Longhi’s essay into print, the Prado has recovered more than a missing scholarly text. The publication returns readers to the moment when a museum visit in 1920 generated a hypothesis that would shape more than a century of debate—and that continues to influence how Pedro Berruguete’s place within the European Renaissance is understood today.
