Luca Signorelli

[poliphilo]

Purchas and her friends are headed for Orvieto. It's not a place I've ever visited, but I've Googled it and looked at pictures and now I've created a version of it in my head. I hope my version isn't too far removed from the real thing.

Unfortunately Purchas has arrived too early to bump into the painter Luca Signorelli who isn't going to be commissioned to paint his fabulous murals in the cathedral until a decade later.

Signorelli's murals depict the End of the World. They're full of muscular writhing bodies. Michelangelo saw them and they inspired his much more famous Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

I like Luca's version better.

Check him out here

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Nice. One of the images (Virgin and Child with the angels, I think) is a remarkable combination of renaissance and medieval. For the rest, I shake my head in amazement at the difference a few hundred miles and a decade or so make between Italian 1490s stuff and Northern European 1480s stuff. The latter is so firmly medieval still, albeit with the wonderful new realism in portraiture.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's remarkable how Italian painting suddenly took off.

Those Signorelli murals are still pretty startling. they must have knocked people's socks off in the 1490s