Portrait of a Man

In the early 1490s Luca Signorelli was working in Volterra, a hill town the Medici of Florence had brought under their control, and it was there that he painted this elderly man in a red beret and black scarf, dressed like a well-off lawyer. Signorelli made his name on vast fresco walls, crowds of muscular bodies in motion. Here he does the opposite and holds still on one face, the white hair, the heavy folds of the jacket. The close attention to surface and texture owes something to painters from the north, especially Hans Memling, whose small panels were reaching Italian collectors around this time. We no longer know who the sitter was.