Review of the exhibition "Luca Signorelli and Rome. Oblivion and rediscovery" in Rome, Capitoline Museums, from July 19 to November 3, 2019.
At the end of the 19th century, Maud Cruttwell, author of one of the first extended monographs on Luca Signorelli (Cortona, circa 1450 - 1523), wrote that the great artist from Cortona would be destined to find nothing but bitterness in Rome. Indeed, beyond the youthful exploit of the Sistine Chapel, his fortune did not come to him in the city of the popes, even when he thought that fate was on his side. It was a disappointment when, in 1513, Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici ascended to the papal throne under the name of Leo X: Signorelli thought that he would have had an easy time obtaining commissions from the new pontiff, given that, years ago, he had already worked for his family (think of the destroyed Education of Pan, carried out towards the end of the eighties for Leo X's father, Lorenzo the Magnificent, or the enigmatic and fundamental Madonna Medici, probably to be traced back to the patronage of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco). On the contrary, Signorelli had to go back to Tuscany without getting any feedback, as attested by a well-known letter that Michelangelo (Caprese, 1475 - Rome, 1564) sent in 1518 to the captain of Cortona, Zanobi di Lucantonio Albizi, to ask him to collect a debt that Signorelli owed him: "he told me that he had come to speak to the Pope", Michelangelo writes, "[...] and that it seemed to him, how can I say, not to be known". But if Rome was mean to Signorelli in terms of work satisfaction, the same cannot be said for what the city gave him back in cultural terms.
Tracing the traces of Luca Signorelli's presence in Rome (this is the aim of the exhibition Luca Signorelli e Roma. Oblivion and rediscovery, in progress at the Capitoline Museums in Rome until November 6, 2019) means deepening the impression that the Tuscan artist exercised the ancient vestiges, so fundamental to his art (and that the artist could see and study directly during his stays) as well as functional to forge the basis of his painting, which Giorgio Vasari recalled to be founded on "drawing and nude particularly" and on "the grace of invention and arrangement of the stories: drawing and grace with which, according to Vasari, Signorelli "opened to most of the craftsmen the way to the last perfection of art, to which those who followed could then give top".
If Signorelli was the "impetuous and tragic" artist (as Adolfo Venturi defined him) we find in the Chapel of San Brizio in Orvieto Cathedral (whose paintings, according to Vasari, were "always highly praised" by Michelangelo), if Pietro Scarpellini was right when he wrote that this great painter was able "to overcome the scenic conditions with solutions so brilliant as to turn artifice into truth and oratory into poetry", and if, as the curators of the Roman exhibition Federica Papi and Claudio Parisi Presicce write in the opening of the catalog, he managed to develop that "particular talent in the painting of nude figures, in foreshortening, in movement and well arranged in space", the reference to the ancient becomes an essential subject.
The small Roman exhibition (about a dozen of Signorelli's works in all) does not propose any particular novelty in the context of the topic "Signorelli in Rome": new, however, is the intention to devote a small focus to the theme, not complete (by admission of the curators), but structured in an organic, and functional, on the one hand, to offer the public an interesting opportunity to spread around an artist now recognized (after centuries of oblivion: part of the exhibition focuses on this aspect as well) as one of the greatest of the Renaissance and as an artist without whom perhaps it would not be possible to explain certain results achieved by Michelangelo and Raphael, and on the other hand to rekindle the spotlight on a subject on which there is probably still work to be done, since there are very few documents attesting to the presence of Signorelli in Rome, the extent of his stays and the terms of his activity in the city. It is also worth noting that the exhibition in Rome is the third ever exhibition on Signorelli, and follows the first monograph of 1953, held in Cortona and Florence (and unfortunately affected by the bitter controversy that arose among scholars: it took ten years for the aforementioned Scarpellini, with his monograph of 1964, to restore order and trace a profile of Signorelli immune from prejudice), and the other important exhibition event held in 2012 in Perugia, Orvieto and Città di Castello.
To be continued.