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Updated: June 13, 2025
Two altar-pieces of his earliest period must be mentioned. One is in the Dresden Gallery, consisting of three pictures painted in tempera on canvas, representing the Virgin, S. Anthony, and S. Sebastian respectively. Although this is probably one of his very earliest works, it is remarkable for the novelty of its treatment and its independence of tradition.
Portable altar-pieces of a small size are generally in this form; and among the most valuable and curious remains of early religious art are the Greek and Byzantine Diptychs, sometimes painted, sometimes carved in ivory . A Triptych is an altar-piece in three parts; the two outer divisions or wings often closing as shutters over the central compartment.
In a word, he humanized the altar-pieces and the cloister-frescoes upon which he worked. In this way the painters rose above the ancient symbols, and brought heaven down to earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the Church.
Exquemelin's story of the sack is probably in the main true. The churches and monasteries were all richly adorned with altar-pieces and paintings, huge quantity of gold and silver, with other precious things; all which the ecclesiastics had hidden and concealed.
For instance, it would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of Gothic to say that one of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches with bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in his opinion, ugly. But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one to say that it had no form.
Tintoretto, who has other miracles of S. Mark in the Royal Palace here and in the Brera at Milan, would have drawn that falling workman magnificently. The other pictures are altar-pieces of much sweetness, by Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Basaiti and Cima.
There may not be anything as fine as the S. Zaccaria or Frari altar-pieces, or anything as exquisite as the Allegories in the Accademia and the Uffizi; but after that our collection is unexcelled in its examples. In this little precious room of the Accademia are thirteen Bellinis, each in its way a gem: enough to prove that variousness of which I spoke.
Having then been summoned by a Scopetine friar, his kinsman, to Cortona, Jacone painted two altar-pieces in oils for the Church of the Madonna, which is without the city.
Above me the evening bell was tolling; its tones died softly away in the aisles, and found an echo in my heart. Some altar-pieces at a distance attracted my attention. I approached to look at them; unconsciously I had wandered through one side of the church, and was now standing at the opposite end.
The Uffizzi Gallery contains a circular "Madonna" by his hand, with a row of naked men for background the forerunner of Michael Angelo's famous "Holy Family." So far had art for art's sake already encroached upon the ecclesiastical domain. To discuss Signorelli's merits as a painter of altar-pieces would be to extend the space allotted to him far beyond its proper limits.
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