SIGNORELLI, LUCA. - Painter, b. at Cortona around the middle of the 15th century, d. there on 16 October 1523. Recorded as early as 1470, he trained under Piero della Francesca, as demonstrated by the remains of a fresco in the so-called Torre del Vescovo at Città di Castello, to which certain Madonnas are stylistically akin (panel in the Fine Arts Museum, Boston; Christ Church Library, Oxford; Villamarina collection, Rome), formerly attributed to Piero della Francesca.
Naturally inclined toward forms of dynamic plasticism, evident from the youthful Annunciation, formerly in the Da Monte house at Gragnone, S. soon abandoned the solemn stasis of Piero della Francesca for a figurative synthesis that preludes Michelangelo, in which formal and compositional grandeur was enhanced by an energetic, springing modelling of Florentine and particularly Pollaiuolesque derivation, absorbed during a probable stay in Florence (c. 1470). Such are the characteristics of the Madonna del latte and the Flagellation (c. 1470-75; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan). The repertory of Florentine suggestions in S. appears enriched when he (1479-81), with the collaboration of Perugino (who had been his fellow pupil in the school of Piero della Francesca) and of Bartolomeo della Gatta, worked on the fresco decoration of the sacristy of the Cura in the basilica of Loreto (Music-making Angels, the Evangelists and the Doctors of the Church in the spandrels of the vault; the Apostles, the Incredulity of St. Thomas and the Conversion of Paul in the wall compartments), where the angels of Verrocchiesque type combine a serpentine flow of draperies derived from Botticelli. S.'s personality manifests itself, moreover, in the plastic grandeur of the formal construction and in the luminism of the Conversion of St. Paul, which, if it cannot be explained without the precedent of Piero's Dream of Constantine, departs from it through its value as a dazzling apparition congenial to the spirit of Signorellian dynamism. Summoned to Rome for the decoration of the Sistine Chapel (1480-1481), S. executed there the fresco with the Testament and Death of Moses, probably again aided by Bartolomeo della Gatta and Perugino. More significant are the easel paintings executed in the immediately following period, in which S. appears intent on creating an humanity of exception, strongly defined through incisive contours and hard, relief-like lights: the altarpiece of Perugia (1484, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo), a monumental architecture of bodies, almost embossed in bronze, against a background of golden luminosity; the Education of Pan (after 1488) in the Berlin Museum, where the exaltation of the nude in compact bodies, modelled by light, cannot be separated from a romantic interpretation of the classical myth; the monumental Circumcision in London (National Gallery, c. 1492-94); the Standard of Urbino (Pinacoteca, 1494); the Madonna with Two Prophets in the Uffizi, whose background, with male nudes in a rocky landscape (which probably inspired that of Michelangelo's Holy Family in the Doni tondo), returns in the vigorous and incisive Portrait of a Man in the Berlin Museum; the Madonna in Munich (Alte Pinakothek); the Holy Family (c. 1495) in the Uffizi and that in the Galleria Rospigliosi in Rome. A more intense dramatic quality and an exasperated realism in the definition of types characterizes, also through the imbalances due to the intervention of collaborators, the frescoes with the Stories of St. Benedict executed by S. in 1497 in the convent of Monte Oliveto Maggiore near Siena; a dramatic quality which, enhanced by the vibration of light, also animates the predellas with the Nativity of the Baptist in the Louvre and the Stories of the Passion and of St. Catherine belonging to the dismembered polyptych of 1498 formerly in S. Agostino in Siena (whose side panels are in the Berlin Museum) and, joined to his idealized compact sense of the nude and to accents of ruthless realism, culminates in the grandiose fresco cycle of the chapel of St. Brizio in the cathedral of Orvieto, which offered suggestions to Michelangelo for the Last Judgment of the Sistine. Begun by Fra Angelico in 1447 in two webs of the ceiling, the decoration of the chapel of St. Brizio was completed by S. between 1499 and 1504, not without the help of collaborators. In the remaining six webs of the vault S. represented the Angelic Hosts, the Apostles, the Doctors of the Church, the Patriarchs, the Martyrs and the Virgins, grouped in solemn choirs; in the upper part of the walls he painted the Sermon of the Antichrist (the two figures on the left are the portraits of S. and of Fra Angelico), the End of the World, the Resurrection of the Dead, the Punishments of the Damned, Paradise and Hell, the Coronation of the Elect; in the socle, finally, the decoration is completed with a band of grotesques adorned with Philosophers and Poets of antiquity and with monochrome roundels illustrating episodes taken from the classical Underworld and from the first 11 cantos of Dante's Purgatorio. To the same stylistic and chronological moment belong the Deposition of Cortona (1502, akin in composition to those of the Collegiata of Castiglion Fiorentino and of the same chapel of St. Brizio at Orvieto), the Crucifixion with the Magdalene in the Uffizi, as well as the frescoes of S. Crescentino at Morra (Stories of the Passion), formerly held to be youthful work. In his last works, through the influence of Perugino, of Raphael and of Timoteo della Vite, S. turns toward lighter colours and more graceful forms (Altarpiece of Brera, 1508; Communion of the Apostles in the cathedral of Cortona, 1512). The Holy Family in the Uffizi is reproduced in colour at v. SACRA FAMIGLIA. - See pl. XXXVIII.
Bibliography10 works
Amalia Mezzetti