SIGNORELLI, Luca
Painter, born in Cortona around the middle of the 15th century, died there on 16 Oct. 1523. Recorded as early as 1470, he trained under Piero della Francesca, as shown by the remains of frescoes in the so-called Bishop’s Tower at Città di Castello, to which are stylistically akin certain Madonnas (panel in the Fine Arts Museum, Boston; in the Christ Church Library, Oxford; in the Villamarina collection, Rome), formerly attributed to Piero della Francesca.
Naturally inclined toward forms of dynamic plasticity, evident even in his early Annunciation, already in the Da Monte house at Gragnone, he soon abandoned the solemn stasis of Piero della Francesca in favor of a figurative synthesis that foreshadows Michelangelo, in which formal and compositional grandeur is reinforced by an energetic and springing model of Florentine origin, and in particular from Pollaiuolo, absorbed during a probable stay in Florence (c. 1470). Such are the traits of the Madonna of the Milk and the Flagellation (c. 1470–75; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan). The repertory of Florentine influences on S. is enriched when, between 1479 and 1481, with the collaboration of Perugino (who had been his fellow pupil under Piero della Francesca) and Bartolomeo della Gatta, he worked on the fresco decoration of the sacristy of the Shrine of the Basilica of Loreto (Musical Angels, the Evangelists and Doctors of the Church in the spandrels of the vault; the Apostles, the Incredulity of St. Thomas and the Conversion of Paul on the lost sections of the walls), where angels of Verrocchio’s type are combined with a serpentine flow of drapery drawn from Botticelli. The artist’s personality, however, is revealed in the plastic grandeur of his formal construction and in the luminism of the Conversion of St. Paul, which, though it cannot be explained without the precedent of Piero’s Dream of Constantine, departs from it in its value as a dazzling apparition congenial to the spirit of Signorelli’s dynamism.
Called to Rome for the decoration of the Sistine Chapel (1480–81), he painted there the fresco of the Testament and Death of Moses, probably with the help of Bartolomeo della Gatta and Perugino. More significant are the panel paintings executed in the immediately following period, in which S. appears intent on creating an exceptional humanity, strongly defined through incisive contours and harsh, projecting lights: the Perugian altarpiece (1484, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo), a monumental architecture of bodies, almost cast 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 modeled by light is not divorced from a romantic interpretation of classical myth; the monumental Circumcision of London (National Gallery, c. 1492–94); the Banner 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), recurs in the vigorous and incisive Portrait of a Man in the Berlin Museum; the Madonna of Munich (Alte Pinakothek); the Holy Family (c. 1495) in the Uffizi and that in the Rospigliosi Gallery in Rome.
A more intense dramatic force and an exaggerated realism in the definition of characterized types, even through the imbalances due to the intervention of assistants, mark the frescoes with the Stories of St. Benedict executed by S. in 1497 in the Olivetan monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore near Siena; a dramatic force that, heightened 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 political exchange 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 accents of ruthless realism, culminates in the grand fresco cycle in the chapel of St. Brizio in the Orvieto cathedral, which provided inspiration for Michelangelo’s Sistine Last Judgment.
Begun by Fra Angelico in 1447 in two sections of the vault, the decoration of the chapel of St. Brizio was completed by S. between 1499 and 1504, not without the help of assistants. In the remaining six sections of the vault he represented the Angelic Phalanxes, the Apostles, the Doctors of the Church, the Patriarchs, the Martyrs and the Virgins, grouped in solemn compositions; on the upper part of the walls he painted the Preaching of the Antichrist (the two figures on the left are portraits of S. and 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; finally, in the dado zone, the decoration is completed with a band of grotesques adorned with philosophers and poets of antiquity and with monochrome tondi illustrating episodes drawn from classical Avernus and from the first eleven cantos of Dante’s Purgatory.
To the same stylistic and chronological moment belong the Deposition of Cortona (1502, akin in composition to those in the Collegiata of Castiglion Fiorentino and in the same chapel of St. Brizio in Orvieto), the Crucifixion with the Magdalene in the Uffizi, as well as the frescoes of S. Crescentino at Morra (Stories of the Passion), formerly considered early works.
In his last works, under the influence of Perugino, Raphael and Timoteo della Vite, S. turns to lighter colors and more graceful forms (Brera Altarpiece, 1508; Communion of the Apostles in the Cortona cathedral, 1512). The Holy Family in the Uffizi is reproduced in color under the heading SACRA FAMIGLIA. — See pl. XXXVIII.
SIGNORIELLO, Nunzio
Neo-scholastic philosopher, b. Naples 1831, d. there 11 Oct. 1889. A follower of Sanseverino (q.v.), and like him a professor at the archiepiscopal lyceum in Naples, he carried forward the same philosophical orientation, effectively contributing to the renewal of scholastic philosophy.
He completed Sanseverino’s *Philosophia christiana cum antiqua et nova comparata*, publishing its third volume and producing a two-volume compendium notable for the security of its doctrine, the density of its content and the clarity of its exposition. But his name is chiefly linked with the *Lexicon peripateticum philosophico-theologicum* (Naples 1854), compiled with great diligence and sound scholarship, which went through numerous editions, including a recent one (Rome 1931).