|
Luca Signorelli
SIGNORELLI, Luca
Painter
Luca Signorelli was traditionally a pupil, with Perugino,
of Piero della Francesca. He is first documented in 1470 and some fragments
in Citta di Castello, of 1474, are his earliest datable works. Although his earliest
works (including two sides of a processional banner in the Brera, Milan) show
some influence from Piero, they already show the very marked influence of
the Pollaiuoli in the use of figures with exaggerated muscular development
in violent action. This Florentine stress on outline as a means of conveying
drama, and the use ot characteristic gesture, link him with Donatello on the
one hand and Verrocchio on the other, as may be seen in his frescoes in the
Santa Casa at Loreto.
He was in Rome in the early 1480s and probably
worked
on the Sistine Chapel frescoes with Perugino, Botticelli, Rosselli and
others.
His masterpiece is the fresco cycle in Orvieto Cathedral (begun by Fra Angelico
in 1447) which he was commissioned to complete in 1499. The frescoes depict
with vivid realism the End of the World, the Coming and Fall of Anti-Christ,
and the Last Judgement. His gifts as a draughtsman are fully revealed in the
sharp foreshortenings of the figures, their strained poses, the perspective, the
hardness of outline, and the imaginative power with which, for example, he
peoples Hell, not with pathetically grotesque creatures half-beast, half-fantasy,
but with vigorous, muscular devils, passionately engaged in fiendish cruelties
and entirely human in form, though with the hideous colour of rotting flesh.
His use of the nude figure for dramatic ends, his interest in classical antiquity
and his terribilita presage, and influenced, Michelangelo. His later works never
again reach this pitch of intensity, probably because the Orvieto frescoes were
painted at the time of the French invasions and while Savonarola's threats
of
doom and the coming of Anti-Christ were in all men's minds.
He was in Rome
again c.1508, and again in 1513, but he stood no chance against Raphael and
Michelangelo and he settled in Cortona as a good, provincial master with a
large shop, producing hard, repetitive, and old-fashioned altarpieces. Vasari
claimed to be his great-nephew.
There are works in Altenburg, Arezzo, Baltimore (Walters), Bergamo, Berlin, Birmingham (Barber Inst.), Boston (Mus.),
Cortona (Mus., churches), Detroit, Florence (Uffizi, Home Mus.), Liverpool,
London (NG), Milan (Brera, Poldi-Pezzoli), Monte Oliveto Maggiore,
Munich, Naples, New York (Met. Mus.), Orvieto (Cath., S. Rocco), Paris
(Louvre, Jacquemart-Andre), Perugia (Mus., Cath.), Philadelphia (Johnson),
Sansepolcro, Toledo Ohio, Umbertide (Sta Croce), Urbino, Venice (Ca d'Oro),
Washington and Yale.
Source: The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists (Penguin Reference Books)
BOOK
Affiliate/Advertising policy.
Leonardo
Giovanni Bellini prints @ amazon.co.uk (direct link to his prints)
Affiliate/Advertising policy.
Book Must Read:
|
|
|