The story
In the summer of 1502 Luca Signorelli, the painter born in Cortona, was working on a Lamentation over the dead Christ for the town's church of Santa Margherita when his son Antonio died of plague. Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of artists, later wrote that the dead Christ was the image of Signorelli's son. The panel now hangs in Cortona's Diocesan Museum, together with his Communion of the Apostles of 1512.
The museum stands opposite the cathedral in the former church of the Gesù, built in the early 16th century for a lay confraternity. It is two churches stacked one above the other, an upper church under a carved wooden ceiling and a lower oratory painted in 1555 with scenes from the Old and New Testaments.
Its other great name is Fra Angelico, the Dominican friar and painter who worked for Cortona's convent of San Domenico. The museum has his altarpiece of the Madonna and Child between Saints Dominic and Peter of Verona, and his Annunciation, painted around 1433 and 1434. Gabriel kneels before Mary in a loggia, while Adam and Eve are driven out of Eden in the distance on the left. The angel's greeting and Mary's answer are painted in lines of text between them, and her reply runs upside down.
