Fig. 172. Lorenzo di San Severino. Madonna and Saints.—Cleveland, O.
A very similar training produces more ambitious but hardly more pleasing results in Niccolò Liberatore of Foligno, (1430 to 1502). Early influenced by Gozzoli, he later aped the intensity of the Venetian, Carlo Crivelli. Niccolò thus chafes within the modest bounds proper to art in Umbria. He essays tragedy and too often achieves burlesque. He paints, like most of the Umbrians, processional banners, and also the most complicated altar-pieces, in which cusps, carving and pinnacles almost efface the Madonna and saints, who show a peasantlike uneasiness amid so much splendor. Such is the character of the triptych in the Vatican, which is dated 1466. It represents rather favorably Niccolò’s at once slender and ambitious talent.
Fig. 173. Melozzo da Forlì. Pope Sixtus IV and his Court. Fresco.—Vatican.
Such obscure artists as we have been considering[[63]] could maintain the idealism out of which a Perugino should grow, could provide his spiritual background. They could do little to nurture him on the positive side. That task fell to men of greater power, who had saturated themselves with Florentine realism—Melozzo da Forlì[[64]] and Luca Signorelli. Both were pupils of that giant among Umbro-Florentines, Piero della Francesca. Melozzo was born in 1438 and early employed by the Dukes of Urbino. He practices an energetic draughtsmanship both in decoration and portraiture, indulges the boldest foreshortening, adds a positive athleticism to that pride of life which we have noted in more static form in his master. Thus his frescoes for the domes of the sacristy of the Santa Casa at Loreto, and the justly famous fragments of playing angels from the demolished sacristy of old St. Peter’s at Rome reveal a strength and measured audacity which at once rival the contemporary effort of Mantegna at Mantua and forecast the more pagan exuberance of Mantegna’s greatest pupil, Correggio. This robust and masculine manner appears in a more restrained and traditional form in the superb fresco portraits of Pope Sixtus IV and his Court, Figure [173], in the Vatican. Such work transcends Umbrian standards.
Fig. 174. Luca Signorelli. Pan, God of Music.—Berlin.
Even more does the intense and rugged art of Melozzo’s fellow disciple, Luca Signorelli.[[65]] Born at Cortona in 1441, we know little of his early career except that he studied with Piero della Francesca, passed to Florence and was permanently swayed by the anatomical and passionate realism of Antonio Pollaiuolo. Signorelli’s early work is obscure to us. We may well study him first in the pastoral mythology, Pan, God of Harmony, Figure [174], now at Berlin. It was painted about 1490 for the Medici, for the villa for which Botticelli designed the Primavera and Birth of Venus. It is inferior to its companion pieces in imagination and delicacy, and particularly in color, but in its own measured way it echoes delightfully the poetic wistfulness of early Florentine humanism. Similar qualities of imagination are in the great fresco The Last Days of Moses, in the Sistine Chapel, painted in 1482 after his design. But the vein is exceptional in Signorelli. Soon he gave himself to a rugged realism, unpleasing in his religious themes. Meeting little favor in the great cities, he painted many altar-pieces for the Umbrian towns. These pictures are stern in spirit and leaden in color. There is no attempt to please. Relentlessly Signorelli pursued his personal quest of expressive anatomy. Legend tells us that, dry-eyed, he sketched the fair body of his own murdered son for the picture of the Entombment at Cortona. We see him introducing nude figures into the background of the round Madonna at the Uffizi, Figure [175]. The experimentalist dominates the artist.
