SIGNORELLI, LUCA. – Painter, born in Cortona around the middle of the 15th century, died there on 16 October 1523. Mentioned as early as 1470, he trained under Piero della Francesca, as demonstrated by the surviving frescoes of the Torre detta del Vescovo in Città di Castello, stylistically akin to several Madonnas (the panel in the Fine Arts Museum of Boston; that in the Christ Church Library of Oxford; and that in the Villamarina collection in Rome), formerly attributed to Piero della Francesca.
Naturally inclined toward forms of dynamic plasticism, evident from his youthful Annunciation, formerly in the Da Monte residence at Gragnone, S. soon abandoned the solemn stillness of Piero della Francesca for a figurative synthesis foreshadowing Michelangelo, in which formal and compositional grandeur was enhanced by an energetic, vibrant modeling of Florentine, and particularly Pollaiuolesque, derivation, acquired during his probable sojourn 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 S.’s Florentine influences appears enriched when he (1479–81), in collaboration with Perugino (who had been his fellow pupil at Piero della Francesca’s school) and Bartolomeo della Gatta, undertook the fresco decoration of the sacristy of the Cura of the basilica of Loreto (Musician Angels, the Evangelists and the Doctors of the Church in the segments of the vault; the Apostles, the Incredulity of St. Thomas and the Conversion of Paul in the compartments of the walls), where the angels combine Verrocchiesque types with a serpentine flow of drapery derived from Botticelli. S.’s personality is nevertheless manifested in the plastic grandeur of the formal construction and in the luminism of the Conversion of St. Paul, which, although inexplicable without Piero’s precedent of the Dream of Constantine, departs from it through its quality as a dazzling apparition congenial to the spirit of Signorelli’s dynamism. Called to Rome for the decoration of the Sistine Chapel (1480–1481), S. executed there the fresco of the Testament and Death of Moses, probably again assisted by Bartolomeo della Gatta and Perugino. More significant are the easel paintings executed in the immediately subsequent period, in which S. appears intent on creating an exceptional humanity, forcefully defined through incisive contours and hard, sharply projecting lights: the Perugia altarpiece (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 modeled by light is inseparable from a romantic interpretation of the classical myth; the monumental Circumcision in London (National Gallery, c. 1492–94); the Banner of Urbino (Pinacoteca, 1494); the Madonna with Two Prophets in the Uffizi, whose background, with male ignudi 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 in Munich (Alte Pinakothek); the Holy Family (c. 1495) in the Uffizi and that in the Rospigliosi Gallery in Rome. A more intense drama and an exasperated realism in the definition of the types characterize, despite the imbalances caused by 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; this drama, enhanced by the vibration of the light, also animates the predellas with the Birth 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 lateral panels are in the Berlin Museum), and, joined to his idealized, compact sense of the nude and accents of ruthless realism, culminates in the grandiose fresco cycle of the chapel of St. Brizio in Orvieto Cathedral, which offered Michelangelo inspiration for the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel. Begun by Beato Angelico in 1447 in two vault panels, the decoration of the chapel of St. Brizio was completed by S. between 1499 and 1504, not without the assistance of collaborators. In the remaining six panels 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 Preaching of the Antichrist (the two figures on the left are portraits of S. and Beato Angelico), the End of the World, the Resurrection of the Dead, the Punishments of the Damned, Paradise and Hell, and the Coronation of the Elect; finally, on the dado, the decoration is completed by a band of grotesques adorned with Philosophers and Poets of antiquity and with monochrome roundels illustrating episodes taken from the classical Avernus and from the first eleven cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio. Belonging to the same stylistic and chronological period are the Deposition in Cortona (1502, compositionally akin to those in the Collegiata of Castiglion Fiorentino and in the same chapel of St. Brizio at Orvieto), the Crucifixion with the Magdalene in the Uffizi, and the frescoes of S. Crescentino at Morra (Stories of the Passion), formerly considered youthful works. In his final works, under the influence of Perugino, Raphael and Timoteo della Vite, S. turned toward lighter colors and more graceful forms (the Brera Altarpiece, 1508; Communion of the Apostles in Cortona Cathedral, 1512). The Holy Family in the Uffizi is reproduced in color at the