The final is dedicated to the reception of Signorelli's art in art, criticism and the market between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It begins with a brief, quick and, even in this case necessarily incomplete, reconnaissance of the artists who were fascinated by his lesson, starting with the engravers who reproduced the frescoes of Orvieto (the route includes works by Vincenzo Pasqualoni-Filippo De Sanctis and Oswald Ufer) to get to the works of Corrado Cagli (Ancona, 1910 - Rome, 1976) and Franco Gentilini (Faenza, 1909 - Rome, 1981) who, in a climate of rappel à l'ordre in Italy between the two wars, according to the curators, looked to the naked Signorellians. The list of "debtors" in the catalog continues: it ranges from logical references (from Friedrich Overbeck's purism to the visions of Claudia Rogge, whose references to Signorelli in his series Everafter in 2011 have been captured by many) to others that are more unlikely (Fucking hell by the Chapman brothers).
As far as critical fortune is concerned, we will briefly go over its history starting with Vasari, continuing through the long 17th and 18th century silence which, apart from a few sporadic appearances (at least Agostino Taja should be mentioned who, in 1750, considered Signorelli the most talented of the artists of the Sistine Chapel, and Domenico Maria Manni who in 1756 discovered some documents about him) lasts until 1791, when Guglielmo Della Valle re-evaluates Signorelli in his Storia del Duomo di Orvieto, to arrive at the late nineteenth century of Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Robert Vischer author of the first monograph on the artist, Maud Cruttwell, Girolamo Mancini, to finally arrive at the exhibition in 1953 and from there to the most recent events.
This is also to introduce the theme of the rediscovery of Signorelli by the antique market, which broadly coincided with the critical rediscovery. The renewed enthusiasm of antiquarî and collectors, however, was also harmful to the works of Signorelli (as well as those of many other artists), since it resulted in the dispersion of several works and the destruction of others: exemplary is the case of the altarpiece by Matelica, cut into several pieces to facilitate the sale (the exhibition shows two fragments, the Pia donna now in the Municipal Art Collections of Bologna and the Head of Christ of the Unicredit collection). At the end of the exhibition, the circle is closed by the Madonna and Child with Four Saints and Angels, linked to Rome if only for the fact that it is kept at the National Museum of Castel Sant'Angelo, in ancient times owned by the Tommasi family of Cortona, which in the second half of the nineteenth century sold much of its art collection (the pieces sold today are kept in museums and collections around the globe).
- The work, which was donated to the Museum of Castel Sant'Angelo in 1928 by the Contini Bonacossi family, who owned it at the time, was originally executed for the convent of San Michelangelo in Cortona. It is an example of Signorelli's late style (made up of monumental figures, in which the echo of ancient statuary can still be felt, and bright colors) and has an irrelevant predella (it tells the stories of Saint John the Baptist, not present in the painting): the predella, therefore, comes from another work and is the result of a subsequent reassembly).
A small weakness of the Roman exhibition lies in the fact that it seems to deal with the theme of the philosophical and allegorical implications of the ruins in Luca Signorelli in a slightly rushed manner, going into detail only with regard to St. Sebastian. Francesco Scoppola wrote that the ruins of Signorelli could allude "to the inexorable passage to which we are all called by time, but on closer inspection they also refer to the entire journey that we must face in the course of our lives and not only to its outcome, until it becomes [...] almost a means, an instrument of every birth, of every project and of every goal" (whether we want to agree or not with such a reading, a discussion about this topic could be fascinating).
The exhibition of the Capitoline Museums, however, works very well in underlining Luca Signorelli's contribution to the history of art: perhaps it could be exaggerated to say that without him we would have had neither, Raphael nor Michelangelo, but it is now clear that the importance of his contribution was of enormous importance, and the exhibition manages well to highlight the relationships that the art of the two great artists of the mature Renaissance had with that of Cortona. In particular, the role of the frescoes in the Chapel of San Brizio is an unquestionable precedent for the Last Judgement that Buonarroti would have painted about thirty years later in the Sistine Chapel, right there where Signorelli had worked fifty years earlier, but not only, is reiterated: certain iconographic solutions used by Signorelli (the Baby Jesus standing in the Madonna of Manchester, the classic nudes behind the Holy Family, the attitudes of the Medici Madonna or the Madonna of Monaco) will provide more than a food for thought to Raphael and Michelangelo.
- Of course, there is not much that has not already been said, and for this reason the main contribution of Luca Signorelli and Rome. Oblivion and rediscovery should be read with the intention of bringing all these suggestions back to the Roman matrix, to the primordial attention to the ancient, to the "ingenuity and spirit of the Pelegrin" that Giovanni Santi attributed to Signorelli and that allowed him to filter through his talent and his brush the impressions that the view of ancient Rome aroused him.
Finally, a word on the agile catalogue of the exhibition, published by De Luca Editori in an unusual 22x22 square format, which certainly makes it very handy (and in this respect is similar to the historical catalogues of the exhibitions) but at the same time penalises the rendering of the photographs of the larger works a bit (it is a little difficult to grasp the details). The essays that make up the volume essentially follow the order of the exhibition, deepening its themes: the choice not to publish the files of the works (but completely understandable, since the last exhibition on Signorelli dates back to seven years ago and since then there have been no new impacting novelties) is singular, the idea of interspersing the essays with "boxes" of one or two pages, on individual themes, that make the reading more animated. The result is, finally, a useful tool to deepen the study of Luca Signorelli.