Details

Name

Luca Signorelli

Brief Biography

circa 1450 - 1523, Italian

Occupation

Artist

Description

Born in Cortona in southern Tuscany, Signorelli was probably trained by Piero della Francesca in nearby Borgo San Sepolcro in the later 1460s. By the time of his earliest certain work, the Testament and Death of Moses in the Sistine Chapel in Rome of c.1482, however, he was clearly already well acquainted with the tense and linear styles practised by Antonio Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio in Florence. During the following two decades, in which he painted his finest works, Signorelli successfully developed a personal style that was both powerfully sculptural and expressively dynamic. In this period he painted a series of important altarpieces for towns and cities in Tuscany and Umbria such as Siena, Volterra and Città di Castello, as well as a mythological allegory for Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence, the Court of Pan (formerly Kaiser-Friedrich- Museum, Berlin; destroyed 1945). His most complex and ambitious work, the fresco decoration of the Cappella Nova (San Brizio chapel) in Orvieto Cathedral (1499–1503), shows a multiplicity of nudes in a wide range of poses, and was, according to Vasari, a major inspiration for Michelangelo. Although in his later career Signorelli continued to receive important commissions in his own wide area of activity, including for a fresco cycle in the Palazzo del Magnifico in Siena (1509), he was no longer highly regarded in the leading centres of Florence and Rome.