Works by Luca Signorelli

Luca Signorelli of Cortona drew and painted the naked body in hard light and steep foreshortening, above all in his Last Judgment frescoes of 1499–1503 in Orvieto Cathedral.

He is said to have studied anatomy in burial grounds, and he showed the nude in action, trying poses beyond nature. In the chalk drawing Two nude youths carrying a young woman and a young man, from the 1490s, one youth is seen from behind and the other from the front, each with a figure on his shoulders, their muscles set out in light and shade. Behind the sitter of Portrait of a Man, of about 1492, small figures, some naked, move among classical ruins.

He probably trained under Piero della Francesca, as his relative Giorgio Vasari wrote. From his early forties he lived in Cortona again and travelled out for commissions. In 1499 he took on the San Brizio chapel in Orvieto Cathedral, where Fra Angelico had begun the vault fifty years earlier, and painted the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment across its vaults and walls. Michelangelo is said to have borrowed some of its figures for his Sistine Chapel fresco.

Religious paintings make up most of the works below, chiefly from the 1490s and 1510s, with a few drawings. In The Crucifixion, of about 1504/1505, soldiers with lances and banners crowd beneath the three crosses while at left a woman in a dark mantle collapses among her companions. Madonna and Child, from about 1505–7, sets the pair against gold covered with winged children in roundels and, in the top corners, heads like ancient coins.

Sources: Wikipedia, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Gemäldegalerie Berlin, National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.