Luca Signorelli

In the cathedral of Orvieto, in central Italy, Luca Signorelli covered the walls of a side chapel with the end of the world. Between about 1499 and 1503 he painted the Last Judgment there: the resurrection of the flesh, the damned dragged down by muscular demons, whole crowds of naked bodies twisting in fear and effort.

Nobody had painted the nude figure in violent motion quite like this before, and a young Michelangelo studied these frescoes closely. The writhing anatomy of the Sistine Ceiling owes something to what Signorelli worked out in Orvieto a decade earlier. He came from Cortona in Tuscany and trained in the workshop of Piero della Francesca, the great master of quiet geometry, then pushed in the opposite direction toward energy and strain.

Vasari, the first biographer of the Italian artists, told a grim story that Signorelli once painted his own dead son, killed young, in order to keep his face. Signorelli outlived the High Renaissance he had helped set in motion and died back in Cortona in 1523, a wealthy and honoured man in his home town.