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Updated: June 12, 2025
In these the spiritual mood dominates and is sustained throughout, and there is no sign of the scientific absorption which sometimes in his treatment of the nude makes us too aware of the student and the realist. One is at times conscious that, painting straight from the life, Signorelli's interest lay chiefly in a faithful reproduction of the body before him.
We feel this distinctly in the treatment of Dante, whose genius seems to have exerted at least as strong an influence over Signorelli's imagination as over that of Michelangelo. The episodes from the Divine Comedy are painted in a rude Gothic spirit. The spirits of Hell seem borrowed from grotesque bas-reliefs of the Pisan school.
Vischer, 77, etc. Vischer considers the likeness to Fiorenzo due to their mutual relation to Verrocchio. Even the splendid decorative engraving called "The Battle of the Nudes," is only a series of duels. A comparison of these figures with the two nude executioners in the Brera "Flagellation" will justify the assertion of Signorelli's superiority as a master of anatomy and movement.
The chief defects in the work are the overcrowding of the composition, and the bad values of distance, caused in a great measure by the gold background. Signorelli's treatment is too realistic, his figures are too solid and too true to life, to bear the decorative background so suitable to the flat, half-symbolic painting of the Sienese school.
And recollecting that fresco of Signorelli's, you feel as if this vast, tall canvas at S. Maria dell' Orto, where topple and welter the dead and the quick, were merely so much rhetorical rhodomontade by the side of the old hymn of the Last Day "Mors stupebit et natura Quum resurget creatura Judicanti responsura."
Titian's chalk-studies, Fra Bartolommeo's, so singularly akin to Andrea del Sarto's, Giorgione's pen-and-ink sketch for a Lucretia, are seen at once by their richness and blurred outlines to be the work of colourists. Signorelli's transcripts from the nude, remarkably similar to those of Michelangelo, reveal a sculptor rather than a painter.
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.
The composition is specially fine, the attention being concentrated without effort on the central figure of the Child, to which the other two serve as a kind of frame. I cannot leave this series of early works, which includes so many Tondos, without drawing attention to the excellence of Signorelli's composition in this difficult form.
These detailed studies do not include all the works of Signorelli, but a complete list of all that are known to the author is to be found in the catalogue at the end. The study of Signorelli's drawings is unsatisfactory, both by reason of their scarcity, and the enormous difference of merit, even among those few which can be considered as genuine.
Vischer makes a strong point of this, as a proof of Verrocchio's influence on Signorelli, but to me it seems that feeling, types of face, and especially the broad and simple treatment of the draperies are entirely different. The most important of these frescoes, however, as best illustrating Signorelli's own peculiar tendencies, is "The Conversion of Saul," in the compartment over the door.
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