The Circumcision

Around 1490 Luca Signorelli was working in Volterra, a hill town in Tuscany, when a local brotherhood devoted to the Holy Name of Jesus asked him for an altarpiece. They wanted the moment, eight days after the birth, when the infant was circumcised and formally given the name Jesus. Signorelli built the picture to fool the eye. The figures stand beneath a painted half-dome that echoed the real architecture of the chapel it was made for, so that a worshipper kneeling at the altar seemed to be watching the event happen in the next alcove. Along the bottom edge he signed it in Latin, Luca of Cortona painted this, naming the town he came from rather than himself.