CnAP. I. LUCA SIGNORELLI. 3 ance, of flesh, muscle, and bone. These drawings are still preserved in the Louvre, and might easily be confounded with similar ones by Michael Angelo; whilst their care fulness and accuracy reveal a knowledge of the laws which Leonardo reduced to a system in his treatise. If indeed Signorelli recalls the first by his vigour and by his pas sion for overstepping the bounds of truth, he may remind us of Leonardo in the scientific path, since the rules which guided the latter were familiar to Piero della Francesca; and a natural medium for the interchange of ideas be tween him and Leonardo is found in Luca Pacioli, the mathematician and friend of both. The truth was what Signorelli thus early strove to at tain; but the truth in art as in the daily intercourse of men frequently and justly offends, unless taste or tact soften its asperities. At the school of Piero, Signorelli learnt no more than to render the exactly true in nature; he found no incitement, or if he did, he disdained, to realize anything more choice or noble than that which is apparent in any one example of humanity. He therefore remained deprived of one of the elements which produces unity and keeping in the works of such men as Domenico Ghirlandaio, Fra Bartolommeo, Raphael, or Andrea del Sarto. He became a painter of mere nude, of a nude excellent in its parts, powerful in bone and muscle, but unselect and academical. Signorelli’s genius and temper naturally led him to pre fer large to small spaces. He is therefore great in the former — at Rome and Orvieto. He set much less value in consequence on charm of colour than upon the exhibi tion of feats in drawing There is a roughness and as perity in the red lights and brown-red shadows of his frescos which indicate contempt for the exquisite feel ing for tone displayed by Piero. His hurtling decision is equally apparent in the division of masses of chiaroscuro. The lights and shadows are like a peal of bells, sharp, defined, and surprising rather than pleasant. These pe culiarities are not confined to Signorelli’s frescos, but ex- 1*