Though Luca's style of design was no more that of Masaccio than Michael
Agnolo's that of Raphael, less characteristic than grand, and fit to be
the vehicle of those conceptions and attitudes which furnished hints of
imitation to the painter of the Last Judgement in the Sistina, yet he
was master of a grace in celestial scenery and angelic attitudes
unapproached by his contemporaries, seldom equalled and never surpassed
by his successors.
Luca Signorelli was a painter of much popularity. Urbino, Volterra,
Florence, Rome, his native and many other towns, possess or possessed
works of his. He was related to the family of the Vasari of Arezzo, and
caressed and encouraged to the art his infant biographer.[56]
Another of the artists employed in the Sistina, inferior to Luca, but
of no despicable (though, if we look at Masaccio, too highly rated)
powers, was Domenico Bigordi, commonly called Del Ghirlandajo;[57] this
is he under whose auspices not only his son Ridolfo, but even Bonaroti
and the best artists of the succeeding epoch, began their course.
Precision of outline, decorum of countenance, variety of ideas, facility
and diligence, distinguish his works. He is the first of Florentines,
who gave depth and keeping to composition: if gold and tinsel glitter
are not entirely banished from his colours, they appear at least less
often. He was fond of introducing portraits among his actors, but with
selection and of distinguished characters; though hands and feet had no
part in his attention to physiognomy. The churches Degli Innocenti,
Santa Trinità, and Sta. Maria Novella at Florence, possess his most
celebrated productions, and many are scattered over Tuscany and the
Ecclesiastic State. Of the two which he painted in the Sistina, the
Resurrection of Christ perished; the Vocation of Peter and Andrew to the
Apostolate Survives.
Cosimo Rosselli and Pier di Cosimo likewise employed at the Sistina,
inferior in all essential parts to their competitors, owe the perpetuity
of their names less to their parti-coloured glare and immoderate display
of gold and azure, which attracted the vulgar eye of their employer the
Pope, than to the luck of having been the masters of Bartolomeo della
Porta, and Andrea del Sarto.
Piero and Antonio Pollajuoli, though employed only as statuaries in the
same Chapel, possessed no inconsiderable powers as painters. Piero's
pictures at S. Miniato discover the scholar of Castagno, austere
countenances and deep and massy colour; but in novelty of composition
and design he yields to his brother and pupil Antonio, whose Martyrdom
of St. Sebastian in the Chapel Pucci of that church, though humble in
style, crude in colour, and oddly rather than originally conceived, has
been numbered with the first productions of the age, because with the
earliest traces of legitimate anatomy it exhibits its application, and
subordinates enumeration to function. Both the Pollajuoli died at Rome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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