Luca Signorelli, an excellent Italian painter, of whom we must now speak, following the chronological order, was in his day considered more famous in Italy and his works were more highly valued than almost any other master's, no matter of what period, because he showed the way to represent nude figures in painting so as to make them appear alive, although with art and difficulty.

Luca, born at Cortona about 1441; died there in 1523. He was a son of Egidio Signorelli, and his mother was a sister of the great-grandfather of Vasari, from whom we obtain almost all the important facts of his career. A pupil of Piero Della Francesea, he was largely influenced in his early days by Pollaiuolo, by whom it seems possible that he may have been instructed.

Signorelli differed from Piero, however, in his interest in the representation of action, which put him in line with contemporary Florentine artists such as the Pollaiolo brothers. The Scourging of Christ (c. 1480), a signed processional banner for the church of S. Maria del Mercato at Fabriano, reveals his developed handling of anatomy.

He must have had a considerable reputation by about 1483, when he was called on to complete the cycle of frescoes on the walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, left unfinished by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Rosselli. (Its is not known why these four artists abandoned the work in 1482, but it has been suggested that they simply downed tools because of slow payment.) Signorelli completed the scheme with distinction, but his finest works are in Orvieto Cathedral, where he painted a magnificent series of six frescoes illustrating the end of the world and the Last Judgement (1499-1504).

In the grand and dramatic scenes in Orvieto, inspired by the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, he displayed a mastery of the nude in a wide variety of poses surpassed at that time only by Michelangelo. Vasari says that “Luca’s works were highly praised by Michelangelo” and several instances of close similarity between the work of the two men can be cited; perhaps the most interesting is the enigmatic seated nude youth in Signorelli’s Last Acts and Death of Moses in the Sistine Chapel, which is remarkably close to some of the Ignudi painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the chapel a quarter of a century later.

By the end of his career, however, Luca had become a conservative artist, working in provincial Cortona, where his large workshop produced numerous altarpieces. 

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