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.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

A good friend of mine (who's actually coming round to see me in about an hour) lived in Bolsena for a year, and spent a lot of time in Orvieto while she was there. She was working as a contact point for people on walking holidays in the region, and meanwhile gathering information for travel writing. So she spent a lot of time investigating the region in detail, and indeed wrote an excellent book on Bolsena itself as the fruit of her time there. If you'd like me to get her to read through the Orvieto sections, or perhaps arrange for you to be able to read some of the stuff she wrote on the area, do let me know.