Luca Signorelli

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

HIS LIFE

(BORN 1441: DIED 1523)

It is a curious fact that, considering the number of documents which exist relating to Signorelli, and the paintings time has spared, so little should be known beyond the merest outline of his life. The very dates of his birth and death are indirectly acquired; the documents leave his youth and early manhood an absolute blank, and there are only two of his numerous works which can with certainty be placed before his thirty-third year. We are, therefore, forced to fall back upon traditionary record, and by the aid of his biographer Vasari, and the evidence of youthful studies which his paintings contain, to patch together a probable account of his life, up to the time when the documents begin. On Vasari, in this case, we can depend with a certain amount of confidence, since Signorelli was his kinsman, and they had been in such personal communication as was possible between an old man and a child.

From Vasari, then, we learn that Luca was born in Cortona, of Egidio Signorelli, and a sister of Lazzaro dè Taldi. This Lazzaro, great grandfather of the biographer, deserves special mention, since it was through his means, and under his guardianship, that Luca was placed as a child to study painting with Pier dei Franceschi, at Arezzo. Vasari tells us that Lazzaro was "a famous painter of his time, not only in his own country, but throughout Tuscany, with a style of painting hardly to be distinguished from that of his great friend, Pietro della Francesca." This, however, is an assertion that has never been supported, and was probably based on the author's pride in his own family, for in the Cortona tax-receipts for the year 1427, he is described merely as a harness-maker (Sellajo di Cavalli.) There is, besides, no record of him among the painters of Arezzo, and no fragment remains of the many works enumerated by his great-grandson. But it is of little consequence whether he was a painter of pictures or a decorator of saddles; what is to our purpose is the fact, that by his means Luca was placed under the tutelage of the painter most capable of developing the noblest qualities of his genius.

Luca was born about 1441, as we gather from Vasari, and if 1452 is the correct date of his uncle Lazzaro's death, his apprenticeship to Pier dei Franceschi must have begun before his eleventh year. It is probable that, with his fellow-pupil Melozzo da Forlì, his senior by three years, Signorelli assisted the master with the frescoes in S. Francesco, although there is no trace of any work that might be from his hand. Vasari tells us that as a youth he laboured "to imitate the style of his master," with such success, that (as he remarked of Lazzaro) their work was hardly to be distinguished apart." The nearest approach to the style of Piero that remains to us is "The Flagellation," of the Brera, Milan, which, however, already shows signs of a more deeply impressed technical influence, but it was probably under Piero's training that Signorelli developed his broad methods of work, and the grand manner which makes his painting so impressive. The later influence visible in the above-mentioned "Flagellation," as throughout all his work, is that of Antonio Pollaiuolo. To him and to Donatello are due the most important features in his artistic development, and in technique he follows much more readily than the Umbrian, the Florentine methods, with which his painting has nearly everything in common....