Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Features  
Subject: Middle Ages & Earlier    

Unlike his contemporaries Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, Luca Signorelli never quite made it through to posterity as a household name. Signorelli: The Complete Paintings is a beautifully produced new book which, with generously large colour reproductions, an essay by Laurence B. Katner and a catalogue of beetlebrowed erudition by Tom Henry, aims to introduce this energetically strange painter’s work to a larger audience.

“With his profound mastery of design, particularly of nudes, and with his grace in invention and composition, Luca Signorelli opened the way to the perfection of art,” wrote Giorgio Vasari, pioneering chronicler of the Italian Renaissance. Seen as a whole Signorelli’s work suggests that Vasari was right about his importance – the vast, swarming compositions with which he decorated the walls of Orvieto Cathedral clearly inspired a host of later Renaissance artists – but it was perverse of him to try and make Signorelli sound so exemplary and correct. “Mastery of design” and “grace in invention” are odd phrases to have flourished in his direction, making him sound almost dull; whereas what seems most striking about Signorelli’s work now is its profound eccentricity – a kind of sublime hallucinatory quality, thoroughly infused with the apocalyptic fervour of the  late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The artist was born in Cortona in southern Tuscany, a subject town of the Florentine state. According to Vasari he was trained by Piero della Francesca, whose lucid and dream-like compositions could hardly be further removed from the work for which Signorelli subsequently became known. Part of the explanation for his departure from Piero’s example may lie in the many years that he subsequently spent in Florence, where he seems to have fallen under the spell first of the classicising Pollaiuolo brothers and then of Sandro Botticelli, creator of The Birth of Venus. Signorelli won the support of the Medici family, for whom he painted a famous classical reverie, The School of Pan (which remains the most celebrated and the most sorely missed of his panel pictures, having been destroyed in the fire that engulfed the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin at the end of the Second World War). He painted religious pictures as well as secular mythologies, the solemn piety of which – as in the work of Botticelli – seems always to have coincided with a profound attraction to the beauties of the pagan past. Many of the altarpieces that Signorelli painted in the 1490s combine an antiquarian fascination for the classical world with an intense religious feeling. In the ravishing Annunciation now to be found in the civic museum of Volterra, an ineffably solemn Gabriel imparts the divine mystery of his message to an evidently flustered Virgin. They meet under a portico supported by richly decorated classical columns, aginst the backdrop of a landscape filled with ruins. God the Father, surrounded by an abbreviated circle of the heavenly host, presides over the scene.

But Signorelli’s greatest work was a series of frescoes done for the Cathedral of Orvieto, a ruggedly beautiful hilltop town in Umbria – a group of pictures which introduced a heightened sense of drama and a new, almost paranoid degree of spiritual extremism into the art of early fifteenth-century Italy. Apocalyptic hysteria was in the air at the time. In nearby Florence the charismatic Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola,  had staged “bonfires of the vanities” accompanied by hellfire sermons warning of the end of the world – a threat taken very seriously as the year 1500 approached, marking as it did the so-called “half-millennium” considered by many at the time to usher in the Final Conflict and the events leading to the Last Judgement. The inflammatory preacher was ultimately consumed by the flames of his own zealotry, burned at the stake for his temerity in challenging the ultimate spiritual authority of  Rome. Signorelli’s frescoes for Orvieto, painted in the immediate aftermath of Savonarola’s spectacular rise and fall, reflect a moment of profound religious anxiety on the Italian peninsula.

The artist signed his contract with the Works Department of Orvieto Cathedral in 1499, agreeing to decorate the new Chapel of San Brizio in exchange for 575 ducats to be paid partly in cash and partly in kind, in the form of wine and wheat. Over the next five years, Signorelli more than earned his keep. His subject, treated over six large-scale narrative paintings, was as unusual as it was topical: the end of the world as recounted in the Book of Revelation. In the resulting frescoes, he developed his fascination with the nude human body in movement and painted by far the most ambitious multi-figure compositions of his time. The sequence begins with a depiction of The Stories of the Antichrist, almost the only picture on this theme in all of Italian art, which seems well calculated to promote a paranoid fear of false preachers. A false Christ stands on a pedestal, a parody of the Messiah with a sinister expression on his face, preaching the words whispered into his ears by the Devil. In the background a great church, symbol perhaps of the Roman Catholic Church itself, is being sacked and looted. In the foreground, almost spoilling out into the space of the viewer, innocent Christians are being viciously garrotted to death. The figures all wear modern dress, which can only have enhanced the sense, in Signorelli’s audience, that such terrible events might unfold at any moment in a town just like theirs. Signorelli has included his own self-portrait in the bottom left-hand corner of the scene. With dead bodies lying tangled at his feet he gazes out at posterity, hands clasped, with a suitably pensive expression on his face.

It is possible that Signorelli was encouraged to paint this subject by the authorities in Rome, as a warning to the people at large against putting their faith, ever again, in the likes of Savonarola. If so the rest of the paintings ram the message home in no uncertain terms. The sequence culminates in a particularly terrifying and gruesome depiction of the Torments of the Damned, but the most original composition of all was Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Flesh. Instead of showing coffins opening to discharge the dead at the sounding of the last trump, Signorelli has the dead miraculously rising up from the ground, heaving themselves bodily out of the earth to emerge into the afterlife, rather than – as in most versions of this subject – simply stepping out of miraculously opened coffins.