Luca Signorelli : The Complete Paintings

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Summary: Luca Signorelli: The Complete Paintings
Review: Tom Henry and Laurence Kanter, both highly regarded scholars of Signorelli's work, have produced the finest and most comprehensive catalogue of Luca Signorelli's paintings to date. Each scholar has museum expertise and each possesses an observant eye for stylistic and technical details, ideal qualifications for producing a complete catalogue of an artist's works. The strong point of this book is the text, which is accurate and written so well that it is comprehensible to both the scholar and the general reader. Whereas both authors contribute to the first two sections, the catalogue, which fills nearly half of the book, is largely the work of Tom Henry. Professor Henry is thoughtful and meticulous in his work. He has viewed every painting first hand to give each work careful attention.
The book is arranged as a typical catalogue, with an explanatory text followed by a chronological survey of the artist's works. The first section contains five chapters that record the major episodes of Signorelli's career, divided more or less by decade. Each chapter is followed by endnote documentation. The general overview is followed by twenty-two full-page (sometimes double-page) color plates, also arranged chronologically, that highlight Signorelli's major works. The last two sections consist of a complete catalogue of Signorelli's paintings with black and white images and a general bibliography. The authors list one hundred and forty-eight works, including autograph works, collaborative pieces, and paintings begun by Signorelli but finished by others. The authors also introduce twenty-three paintings not found in any previous Signorelli catalogue; they list eight works of uncertain attribution; and they reject sixty-four works. Selected drawings are included alongside paintings to which they relate.
Any weaknesses in the book lie in layout and design. The publisher was generous with color plates. However, the designer and authors must not have discussed the choice or placement of the 39 high-quality, full-bleed details of paintings interspersed throughout the opening pages and the five overview chapters, for they are not necessarily placed near text that discusses them. Each chapter is preceded by a color detail on the left and a white page with a chapter heading on the right. Although the details are taken from works discussed in the chapter they accompany, they may have no relation to their facing text, are never cited in the text, and often do not illustrate the authors' points. A few photographic diagrams in the catalogue section reconstruct the possible arrangement of various parts of mutilated altarpieces. One photograph gives a partial sense of the total space in the fresco program at Orvieto, Signorelli's acknowledged masterwork.
Both authors keep Signorelli's importance in his own day in the forefront of their passages as they point out his major contributions to Italian Renaissance painting. The superb scholarship and accessible text of Henry and Kanter should help raise Signorelli from his undeserved relative anonymity to the prominent position he held in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.