Luca Signorelli: A Renaissance Tondo Recovered

A first look at a newly discovered work by one of the great artists of the Renaissance In January 2020, a previously unrecognized masterpiece by Luca Signorelli (ca. 1445–1523) was discovered by Yale University Art Gallery curators and conservators and freed from multiple layers of grime, regilding, and repainting. The composition—a tondo of the Virgin and Child with saints—was previously known only through two contemporary replicas, one of which was thought to be the original. The discovery of the Gallery’s tondo sheds new light on what is considered the climax of Signorelli’s career at the turn of the sixteenth century, a defining moment in the evolution of Italian painting from the Early to the High Renaissance. Presenting the conserved tondo and its original frame for the first time, this volume investigates the work’s style and dating, the meaning of its enigmatic combination of figures, its probable Sienese patronage, and the implications of its repetition in a second and third version. Laurence Kanter discusses the work in relation to Signorelli’s groundbreaking fresco cycles at the cathedral of Orvieto and the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, near Siena, and considers the possibility that the alla grottesca decoration of the frame may have been designed, and possibly painted, by Signorelli himself and that this may be the first tondo—a class of object popular in Florence but less common elsewhere—ever painted in Siena. Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery