Signorelli luca biography of albert
Luca Signorelli, in full Luca d’Egidio di Ventura de’ Signorelli, also called Luca da Cortona (born 1445/50, Cortona, Republic of Florence - died Oct. 16, 1523, Cortona), Renaissance painter**, best known for his nudes and for his novel compositional device.
It is likely that Signorelli was a pupil of Piero della Francesca** in the 1460s.
The first certain surviving work by him, a fragmentary fresco (1474) now in the museum at Città di Castello, shows a strong influence from Piero**.
His first signed work was a processional banner with a Madonna on one side and a Flagellation on the other; these hang in the Brera, Milan, as separate pictures. They still show links with the style of Piero, but the dominant influence is that of Florence and especially the scientific naturalism of the Pollaiuolo brothers, which suggests that Signorelli visited Florence in the 1470s.
In 1479 he was elected to the Council of 18 in his native Cortona, and for the rest of his life he was active in politics.
About 1483 he went to Rome, where the “Testament of Moses” fresco in the Sistine Chapel is unanimously attributed to him. By that date his style had become fixed, his interest in dramatic action and the expression of great muscular effort marking him as an essentially Florentine naturalist. The S. Onofrio altarpiece (1484) for Perugia cathedral shows the same qualities.
Between 1497-1498 he was at work on a fresco cycle of scenes from the life of St. Benedict in the monastery at Monteoliveto Maggiore, near Siena.
His masterpiece, the frescoes of “The End of the World” and the “Last Judgment” (1499-1502), is in the chapel of S. Brizio in Orvieto cathedral.
Those frescoes, which greatly influenced Michelangelo, are crowded with powerful nudes painted in many postures that accentuate their musculature. Signorelli had little sense of colour, but here his greenish and purple devils ad
Signorelli
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Luca Signorelli (his full name was Luca d’Egidio di Luca di Ventura) was from Cortona in Southern Tuscany. His father, Egidio di Ventura Signorelli, was a painter in the city. Luca was once thought to have been born in 1441 (on the basis of Vasari’s claim that he was 82 when he died), but this is probably about ten years too early. According both to Vasari (who claimed to be his great-nephew) and the mathematician Fra Luca Pacioli, he was a pupil of Piero della Francesca. He would presumably have served his apprenticeship in the 1460s, when Piero was working in Arezzo. He must also have had early contact with the Florentine art world, which was dominated at this time by the workshops of the Pollaiuolo and Andrea Verrocchio.Signorelli is known to have worked at Cortona, Arezzo and Città di Castello in the early 1470s, and he was employed by the Della Rovere at Loreto in the late 1470s or 1480s. He was called to Rome in 1481 or 1482 to help complete the cycle of frescoes on the walls of the Sistine Chapel. During the later 1480s he appears to have been active mainly in Cortona, but he also produced works for the Medici in Florence. His mysterious and melancholy School of Panwas painted at this time, probably for Lorenzo de’ Medici. It became Signorelli’s most celebrated panel painting after it was discovered in a Florentine attic in 1865. (Formerly at Berlin, it was lost in the disastrous fire of May 1945.) It was through the agency of Lorenzo de' Medici that the artist acquired in the early 1490s a workshop at Cortona in premises beneath the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo that had previously belonged to the Guelph Party of Florence. During the same decade, Signorelli obtained commissions from Volterra (1491), Città di Castello (1493-98) and Monte Oliveto (1498-9).
Signorelli’s great masterpiece is the fresco cycle illustrating the Last Judgement in Orvieto Cathedral (1499-1504), which
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Jesus Christ in the act of benediction; On the reverse, study of an angel playing on the violin; Drawn with the brush on pale grey prepared paper, and heightened with white.
Object details
| Category | |
| Object type | |
| Materials and techniques | Drawn with the brush on pale grey prepared paper, and heightened with white |
| Brief description | Drawing, God the Father blessing after Pietro Perugino, Florentine school, 16th century |
| Physical description | Jesus Christ in the act of benediction; On the reverse, study of an angel playing on the violin; Drawn with the brush on pale grey prepared paper, and heightened with white. |
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| Credit line | Bequeathed by Rev. Alexander Dyce |
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