GIORGIO VASARI, THE RENAISSANCE PAINTER and architect whose Lives of the Artists remains, nearly five centuries later, the unique contemporary account of many of the Italian masters, provides a firsthand impression of what Luca Signorelli was like as a human being. This sixteenth-century enthusiast of everything visual—who figured in the Medici court, befriended Michelangelo, and had his finger on the pulse of artistic events in central Italy in the mid 1500s—also offers a fascinating perspective on Signorelli’s art.
I’m surprised that the Karpes did not turn to Vasari, but, given that they were not art historians, they may have been unaware of him. They probably headed straight to the S section in the shelves of books organized by artists’ names at the West Hartford Public Library, found Maud Cruttwell’s opus, and decided they had what they needed. For that matter, I am sorry that Freud appears never to have discovered Vasari on Signorelli, because it would have been fascinating had he used that text as the basis for some sort of commentary on the life of the artist whose work moved him even more than did the art of Leonardo, about whose personal history he wrote so trenchantly. Vasari was related by blood to Signorelli, who, while seventy years older than he, was still alive during the first twelve years of Vasari’s life. Giorgio Vasari’s great-grandfather, Lazzaro Vasari, was the brother of Luca Signorelli’s father, and when Signorelli was young and studying with Piero della Francesca, he had lived in Lazzaro Vasari’s house. Sixty years later, he would return there briefly, when young Giorgio Vasari’s parents owned the house, and by the time Signorelli died in 1523, the observant boy formed some strong impressions of this painter he greatly admired.
Vasari’s short chapter on our man in Lives of the Artists begins with the words “The excellent painter, Luca Signorelli” and immediately provides the astounding information that “his work was more valued than that of any other master of whatever time.” Vasari immediately says why. The writer’s succinct assessment of Signorelli’s primary achievement nails what for me is the reason that Freud both esteemed the artist among all others but then could not remember his name: “In his painting he introduced the nude and proved that it could, though not without consummate art, be made to seem as real as life.”
Vasari calls “The Last Judgment” at Orvieto “a most singular and fanciful invention,” and refers to the “many beautiful figures” in it. He emphasizes the influence this work had on the way Michelangelo composed some of the figures in the Sistine Chapel. But the main impact of our reading of Vasari is a highly unusual, and excruciating, detail of Signorelli’s life. Vasari tells us that Signorelli’s son, “a youth of singular beauty in face and person whom he tenderly loved, was killed in Cortona. In his deep grief the father had the child undressed, and with extraordinary constancy of soul, uttering no complaint and shedding no tear, painted the portrait of his dead child so that he might still be able to contemplate that which nature had given and fate taken away.”
What would Freud have made of this, if only he had known? And the Karpes: Surely they would have had something to say, given their emphasis on the father/son issues invoked in Freud by Signorelli’s work.
I only acquired this chilling information—one does not know which is more horrific, the death itself or the father’s reaction—toward the end of my investigation of Freud’s trip and Signorelli’s art. It made me rethink something. If the artist’s son died as a child, was his obsession with fully developed young men in part because they were what his son might have become if only he had lived? He could above all have been a bereaved father, for whom homosexuality was never an issue—in spite of what the paintings suggest. On the other hand, he could have been a necrophiliac pervert or a gay man whose love for his son had nothing to do with his own sexuality. We will never know; nor does it matter.
One thing, however, is sure. It is that Signorelli’s treatment of his son’s corpse was the opposite of anything Jewish. When Freud buried his father, he would have followed the tradition not just of closing the eyes but of keeping the dead body concealed from view. Embalming—which was probably necessary for Signorelli to paint his dead son—was forbidden. Tears, on the other hand, would not have been discouraged after Jacob Freud died. Stoicism has no role in traditional Jewish mourning practices.
VASARI RECOUNTS A TOUCHING STORY ABOUT SIGNORELLI from the artist’s dotage. This is the time period when, “having worked for almost all of the princes of Italy and having grown old,” Signorelli was back in Cortona, where he was born, and “worked for his pleasure since he could not resign himself to a life of idleness.” In Cortona, Signorelli painted a Life of the Virgin for the nuns of Santa Margherita in Arezzo. The work was then transported to that convent. Signorelli, although eighty years old and frail, made the trip to watch the installation of the painting and to visit friends and relatives.
This was when Signorelli again stayed at the Casa Vasari, the place where he had lived some sixty years earlier while he had studied with Piero. It was now home to eight-year-old Giorgio Vasari. Vasari at the time of his writing well recalled “the good old man, who was most courteous and agreeable.” On hearing that the only thing “Giorgino”—which was what everyone called the little boy—wanted to do at school was draw figures, and that he was not interested in other academic subjects, Signorelli urged the boy’s father to let him learn to draw, devoting himself to other forms of learning only “afterward.” Signorelli told Antonio, Giorgino’s father, that “the knowledge of design, if not profitable, cannot fail to be honorable and advantageous.” Vasari then describes a vivid memory from when he was eight: “Then he [eighty-year-old Signorelli] turned to me and said, ‘Study well, little kinsman.’ He said many other things about me which I refrain from repeating because I know I have not lived up to the expectations of the good old man.”
During Signorelli’s visit to Arezzo, “Giorgino” developed a “severe nosebleed.” It was Signorelli who treated it: “He bound a jasper round my neck with his own hand and with infinite tenderness. This recollection of Luca I shall cherish while I live.”
It is practically a form of hero worship, in which Vasari’s penultimate paragraph is the coup de grace:
Luca Signorelli was a man of the most upright life, sincere in all things, affectionate, mild, and aimiable in his dealing with all, and most especially courteous to everyone who desired his works. He was a very kind, efficient instructor to his disciples. He lived very splendidly, dressed handsomely, and was always held in the highest esteem for his many good qualities both at home and abroad.
Were it not for the way that Vasari heaps similar praise on almost every other artist about whom he writes, we might take this as the gospel. Of Giotto, he declares, “He was loved by all, most especially by eminent men of all professions.” He tells us that “Andrea Mantegna was so kindly, and in every way so estimable, that his memory must ever be held in cordial respect.” Of Filippino Lippi, Vasari announces, “Ever courteous, obliging, and friendly, Filippino was lamented by all, especially by the noble youth of Florence, who often availed themselves of his readiness and generosity.” We learn of Pietro Perugino: “His manner pleased so in his day that artists came from France, Spain, Germany and other countries to study his methods.” Leonardo da Vinci garners such accolades that the others pale: “Nor was there ever an artist who did more to honor the art of painting. The radiance of his countenance, which was splendidly beautiful, brought cheer to the most melancholy. . . . He was physically so strong that he could bend a horseshoe as if it were lead. His generous liberality offered hospitality to rich or poor. . . . For his many admirable qualities, with which he was so richly endowed, . . . his fame can never be extinguished.”
What a place the world would be if it was peopled only with artists who lived up to these descriptions!
IN The Central Painters of the Renaissance, Bernhard (as he spelled his name for the publication of that book, although elsewhere, both before and after, he was just plain Bernard) Berenson gives his particular take on Signorelli. This was in 1899, the same year that his former housekeeper/secretary Maud Cruttwell was writing her monograph, but his main points about Signorelli’s art are quite different from hers.
Berenson starts by comparing Signorelli to Piero della Francesca’s other student, Melozzo da Forlì, emphasizing that for Melozzo what counted was the quintessential expression of emotions ranging from “the joy in mere living” to “solemnity and magical aloofness.” Then, rising to a crescendo, he brings Signorelli into the picture: “Luca Signorelli does not glow with Melozzo’s consuming fire; and yet he takes his rank beyond. His was the finer and deeper mind, his genius fetched the larger compass, his perception of value, both in life and in art, was subtler and more just. Even in feeling for the poetry in things, Luca was inferior to no man.”
As if that is not enough, Berenson then credits Signorelli with having “a sense for tactile values scarcely less than Giotto’s.” Beyond that, he had “Masaccio’s or Piero dei Franceschi’s [della Francesca’s] command over action.”
I find this puzzling from the word go. After claiming that Signorelli lacks Melozzo’s “consuming fire,” Berenson then says he is unequaled in his “feeling for the poetry in things” and reached beyond Melozzo. Is that not a contradiction? The renowned art historian seems to credit Signorelli with what he has just said the painter is missing, adding confusion with that odd expression “fetched the larger compass.” For me, “tactile values” are really not a big part of Giotto’s work; Giotto’s art is utterly heavenly, in a realm of its own, because of the distribution of color and the incredible drawing and composition, while the tactile is not particularly relevant. And “command over action” is not essential to Masaccio or Piero; the marvel of the first of these two great painters is in the solidity of the forms, their bold presence, whereas for the second it is the dreamlike, otherworldly quality that is vital. Berenson has come up with straw horses, only to knock them down.
But he is leading somewhere with all these flourishes. “Great artist he would have been with these qualities alone,” writes Berenson with his odd style, “but for him they were means to an end, and that end, different from Melozzo’s, was his joy in the Nude.”
What I most like here is the way that Berenson has capitalized “Nude.” I have never known of anyone else to do this, but he keeps it up throughout the text. Having thus elevated “the Nude” to godlike status, he explains why: “I must limit myself here to the statement that the Nude human figure is the only object which in perfection conveys to us values of touch and particularly of movement. Hence the painting of the Nude is the supreme endeavour of the very greatest artists; and, when successfully treated, the most life-communicating and life-enhancing theme is existence.” While Berenson never explains his need for self-limitation, I assume he means his censoring of any specific reference to sex.
For all his circumlocution, Berenson’s main point does give us insight into why Freud was overwhelmed by this art. Signorelli’s achievement was to evoke human aliveness in all its magnitude.
Berenson rightly points out that the form of “life-enhancing” imagery in Signorelli’s art is by and large male. Berenson makes one of his charming, slightly obtuse, sideways statements about the matter. “The female form revealed itself to him but reluctantly,” the art historian points out. For this reason, while “Signorelli’s Nude . . . has . . . a certain gigantic robustness and suggestions of primeval energy,” it is not the equal of Michelangelo’s.
Then Berenson again uses comparison to make a point. The problem, he tells us, with Signorelli is “that he was a Central Italian—which is almost as much as to say an Illustrator.” From here Berenson becomes ridiculous, at least to me. He goes this way and that until he comes to the conclusion that “Michelangelo was also an Illustrator—alas!—but he, at least, where he could not perfectly weld Art and Illustration, sacrificed Illustration to Art.”
Having taken himself into the ring, Berenson then calls time-out. “But a truce to his faults! . . . Luca Signorelli none the less remains one of the grandest—mark you, I do not say pleasantest—Illustrators of modern times. . . . He was the first to illustrate our own house of life.” Signorelli achieves this, writes Berenson, above all in the Orvieto frescoes. “How we are made to feel the murky bewilderment of the risen dead, the glad, sweet joy of the blessed, the forces overwhelming the damned! It would not have been possible to communicate such feelings but for the Nude, which possesses to the highest degree the power to make us feel, all over our own bodies, its own state.” This is another of Berenson’s observations the validity of which eludes me completely. When I look at the nudes, or Nudes, in Orvieto, I don’t feel, alas, that those bodies and mine have all that much in common; nor do I imagine that Freud felt he measured up to the musclemen. I wonder how Berenson evaluated his own body when he looked at Signorelli’s specimens, since he certainly did not resemble them.
Yet if Berenson means that the Orvieto frescoes have an effect on our own psychological state, there he has a point. Looking around the Cappella Nova, we can feel at certain moments as if we are the ones being pulled into hell, having our heads snapped off our necks, or being trampled. Elsewhere, we identify with the characters ascending to a realm of calm and joy. This may have been the clincher for Freud. The ability of Signorelli’s images to cause extreme anxiety at one moment and plentiful well-being at the next, and the reasons for which the frescoes induce such contradictory feelings, explain in part why the great investigator of the human mind was so overwhelmed that he forgot the name, so like his own, of the illustrator of these states of mind.