had his workshop in
the Macello de' Corvi, but we know very little about the details of
his life there. His correspondence happens to be singularly scanty
between the years 1513 and 1516. One letter, however, written in May
1518, to the Capitano of Cortona throws a ray of light upon this
barren tract of time, and introduces an artist of eminence, whose
intellectual affinity to Michelangelo will always remain a matter of
interest. "While I was at Rome, in the first year of Pope Leo, there
came the Master Luca Signorelli of Cortona, painter. I met him one day
near Monte Giordano, and he told me that he was come to beg something
from the Pope, I forget what: he had run the risk of losing life and
limb for his devotion to the house of Medici, and now it seemed they
did not recognise him: and so forth, saying many things I have
forgotten. After these discourses, he asked me for forty giulios [a
coin equal in value to the more modern paolo, and worth perhaps eight
shillings of present money], and told me where to send them to, at the
house of a shoemaker, his lodgings. I not having the money about me,
promised to send it, and did so by the hand of a young man in my
service, called Silvio, who is still alive and in Rome, I believe.
After the lapse of some days, perhaps because his business with the
Pope had failed, Messer Luca came to my house in the Macello de'
Corvi, the same where I live now, and found me working on a marble
statue, four cubits in height, which has the hands bound behind the
back, and bewailed himself with me, and begged another forty, saying
that he wanted to leave Rome. I went up to my bedroom, and brought the
money down in the presence of a Bolognese maid I kept, and I think the
Silvio above mentioned was also there. When Luca got the cash, he went
away, and I have never seen him since; but I remember complaining to
him, because I was out of health and could not work, and he said:
'Have no fear, for the angels from heaven will come to take you in
their arms and aid you.'" This is in several ways an interesting
document. It brings vividly before our eyes magnificent expensive
Signorelli and his meanly living comrade, each of them mighty masters
of a terrible and noble style, passionate lovers of the nude, devoted
to masculine types of beauty, but widely and profoundly severed by
differences in their personal tastes and habits. It also gives us a
glimpse into Michelangelo's workshop at the moment when he w