Luca Signorelli. By Maud Cruttwell. "Great Masters Series." (G. Ball
and Sons. 6s.)—This is an excellent study of one of the most interesting masters of the Renaissance. Miss Cruttwell per- haps hardly points out that Signorelli's great qualities of vehement strength often in his easel pictures led him to the verge of grotesqueness. In altar pieces his art of composition is not displayed with the same success as in the great frescos at Orvieto. In these the various elements are fused together, but in the smaller works too often the figures seem quite independent of each other. Miss Cruttwell points out bow deeply interested Signorelli was by the problems of the move- ments of the human body, and claims that he solved these problems perfectly. We should prefer to say that he pointed out the means which enabled Michelangelo to make the human body
at once the highest form of intellectual expression and decorative beauty.
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