consequence whether he was a painter of pictures or a decorator
of saddles; what is to our purpose is the fact, that by his means Luca
was placed under the tutelage of the painter most capable of developing
the noblest qualities of his genius.

Luca was born about 1441, as we gather from Vasari, and if 1452 is the
correct date of his uncle Lazzaro's death, his apprenticeship to Pier
dei Franceschi must have begun before his eleventh year. It is probable
that, with his fellow-pupil Melozzo da Forli, his senior by three years,
Signorelli assisted the master with the frescoes in S. Francesco,
although there is no trace of any work that might be from his hand.
Vasari tells us that as a youth he laboured "to imitate the style of his
master," with such success, that (as he remarked of Lazzaro) "their work
was hardly to be distinguished apart."[6] The nearest approach to the
style of Piero that remains to us is "The Flagellation," of the Brera,
Milan, which, however, already shows signs of a more deeply impressed
technical influence, but it was probably under Piero's training that
Signorelli developed his broad methods of work, and the grand manner
which makes his painting so impressive. The later influence visible in
the above-mentioned "Flagellation," as throughout all his work, is that
of Antonio Pollaiuolo. To him and to Donatello are due the most
important features in his artistic development, and in technique he
follows much more readily than the Umbrian, the Florentine methods, with
which his painting has nearly everything in common. Of the influence of
Donatello it may justly be said that every painter and sculptor of the
fifteenth century submitted to it, but few were so completely touched by
his spirit as Signorelli. Not only, as we shall see later, did he
transfer attitudes and features from Donatello's statues into his
earlier paintings, but he caught, and even exaggerated, the confident
and somewhat arrogant spirit of his work, and exploited it with the same
uncompromising realism.

The influence of Antonio Pollaiuolo was still more important, and is so
evident in the whole mass of his painting, that with no other warrant
we may feel certain that he spent a considerable time either as pupil or
assistant to the Florentine master. The passion of Pollaiuolo was to
discover the science of movement in the human frame. "He understood the
nude in a more modern way than the masters before him," says Vasari,
"and he remov