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At his best he anticipated Michael Angelo in power and grandeur, but he was given to exaggeration. His fame rests principally on his frescoes at Orvieto, where, by a strange chance, he was appointed, after an interval of time, to continue and complete the work begun by Fra Angelico, the master most opposed to Signorelli in style.

Two Periods in the True Renaissance Andrea Mantegna His Statuesque Design His Naturalism Roman Inspiration Triumph of Julius Caesar Bas-reliefs Luca Signorelli The Precursor of Michael Angelo Anatomical Studies Sense of Beauty The Chapel of S. Brizio at Orvieto Its Arabesques and Medallions Degrees in his Ideal Enthusiasm for Organic Life Mode of treating Classical Subjects Perugino His Pietistic Style His Formalism The Psychological Problem of his Life Perugino's Pupils Pinturicchio At Spello and Siena Francia Fra Bartolommeo Transition to the Golden Age Lionardo da Vinci The Magician of the Renaissance Raphael The Melodist Correggio The Faun Michael Angelo The Prophet.

Viewed in this light, the vault of the Sistine and the later fresco of the Last Judgment may be taken as the final outcome of all previous Italian art upon a single line of creative energy, and that line the one anticipated by Luca Signorelli.

In these two last paintings we get a hint of the great work that was to come three years later at Orvieto. Signorelli has put forth all his strength in these groups of swaggering youths in every posture of conscious power and pride, and never perhaps been more successful in individual figures.

Studying Signorelli, we study a parallel psychological problem.

Thus we see the men and women of the Renaissance in the works of all its painters: heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in Filippino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; while mediæval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's Building of Babel.

GIORGIO VASARI, better known as the chronicler of the works of other artists than for the excellence of his own, was born at Arezzo, 1512 died at Florence, 1574. His father was a painter, and the family was connected by ties of relationship with Luca Signorelli of Cortona. Among the many masters under whom he studied was Andrea del Sarto.

No one who has studied Michelangelo impartially will deny that in this preference for the violent he came near to Signorelli. We feel it in his choice of attitude, the strain he puts upon the lines of plastic composition, the stormy energy of his conception and expression. It is what we call his terribilit

The next year, 1516, Signorelli painted "The Deposition," of Umbertide, in which he shows all the technical power of his maturity (or was it, perhaps, that he left less of the execution to assistants?). It was executed for the little dark church of Santa Croce, in this village, till recently called La Fratta, and still stands over the high altar not, however, in its original frame, which was removed in the seventeenth century. It seems that there was a lunette over the top, containing a Piet

We thus obtain four several degrees of form: the demoniac, the abstract nude, the adolescent beauty of young men copied from choice models, and the angelic. Except in his angels, Signorelli was comparatively indifferent to what is commonly considered beauty. He was not careful to select his models, or to idealise their type.