his figures, that his great work, the frescoes of the Cathedral of Orvieto, representing the Last Judgment, were studied and even imitated by Michael Angelo. This original and illustrious painter was born at Cortona in 1441. We have no reason to suppose that he was distinguished, like so many of his compeers, by any early or precocious excellence in his art; his first works, of which we have any account, date about 1472, when he was thirty-seven. Signorelli was a man of great learning and industry as well as original genius—of irreproachable life and amiable manners; courteous and helpful to those who needed his assistance; to his numerous scholars kind and communicative, as became a great and generous artist. His principal works are the grand mural frescoes at Orvieto, in the Sistine Chapel at Rome, and in the convent of Monte Uliveto, near Sienna. His moveable pictures and altarpieces are of great value. Whatever subject he treated, whether religious or classical, he treated with decision, with power and grandeur in the grouping and forms, and with singular depth and originality in the heads. He was famous in his lifetime, enriched by constant employment, and is recorded as having been several times elected as chief magistrate of his native city of Cortona, then free and prosperous. The year of Signorelli's death is not exactly known, but he certainly lived to be upwards of eighty. This painter was apparently a favourite of Fuseli, whose compositions frequently remind us of the long limbs and animated, but sometimes exaggerated, action of Signorelli. We have, as yet, no picture by him in our National Gallery. DOMENICO DAL GHIRLANDAJO. BORN 1451, DIED 1495. DOMENICO DAL GHIRLANDAJO was also employed in the Sistine Chapel, but he was then young, and, of his two pictures there, one only remains, the Calling of St. Peter and St. Andrew;-so inferior to his later productions, that we do not recognise here the hand of him who became afterwards one of the greatest and most memorable painters of his time. Domenico Corradi, or Bigordi, was born at Florence in 1451, and was educated by his father for his own profession, that of a goldsmith. In this art he acquired great skill, and displayed in his designs uncommon elegance of fancy. He was the first who invented the silver ornaments in the form of a wreath or garland (Ghirlanda) which became a fashion with the Florentine women, and from which he obtained the name of Ghirlandajo, or Grillandajo, as it is sometimes written. At the age of four-and-twenty he quitted the profession of goldsmith, and became a painter. While employed in his father's workshop he had amused himself with taking the likenesses of all the persons he saw, so rapidly, and with so much liveliness and truth, as to astonish every one: the exact drawing and modelling of forms, the inventive fancy exercised in his mechanical art, and the turn for portraiture, are displayed in all his subsequent productions. These were so many in number, so various in subject, and so adhirable, that only a few of them can be noticed here. After he returned from Rome his first work was the painting of a chapel of the Vespucci family, in the church of Ognissanti (All Saints), in which he introduced, in 1485, the portrait of Amerigo Vespuccio the navigator, who afterwards gave his name to a new world. Ghirlandajo painted a chapel for a certain Florentine citizen, Francesco Sassetti, in the church of the Trinita. Here he represented the whole life of Francesco's patron saint, St. Francis, in a series of pictures full of feeling and dramatic power. As he was confined to the popular histories and traditions, which had been treated again and again by successive painters, and in which it was necessary to conform to certain fixed and prescribed rules, it was difficult to introduce any variety in the conception. Yet he has done this simply by the mere force of expression. The most excellent of these frescoes is the Death of St. Francis, surrounded by the monks of his order, in which the aged heads, full of grief, awe, resignation, are depicted with wonderful skill: at the foot of the bier is an old bishop chanting the litanies, with spectacles on his nose, which is the earliest known representation of these implements, then recently invented. On one side of the picture is the kneeling figure of Francesco Sassetti, and on the other Madonna Nera, his wife. All these histories of St. Francis are engraved in Lasinio's Early Florentine Masters,' as are also the magnificent frescoes in the choir of Santa Maria Novella, his greatest work. This he undertook for a generous and public-spirited citizen of Florence, Giovanni Tornabuoni, who agreed to repair the choir at his own cost, and, moreover, to pay Ghirlandajo one thousand two hundred gold ducats for painting the walls in fresco, and to add two hundred more if he were well satisfied with the performance. Ghirlandajo devoted four years to his task. He painted on the right-hand wall the history of St. John the Baptist; and, on the left, various incidents from the life of the Virgin. One of the most beautiful represents the Birth of the Virgin: female attendants, charming graceful figures, are aiding the mother or intent on the newborn child; while a lady, in the elegant costume of the Florentine ladies of that time, and holding a handkerchief in her hand, is seen advancing, as if to pay her visit of congratulation. This is the portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, one of the loveliest women of the time. He has introduced her again as one of the attendants in the Visit of the Virgin to St. Elizabeth. In the other pictures he has introduced the figures of Lorenzo de' Medici, Poliziano, Demetrio Greco, Marsilio Ficino, and other celebrated persons (of whom there are notices in Roscoe's 'Life of Lorenzo de' Medici'), besides his own portrait and those of many other persons of that time. The idea of crowding these sacred and mystical subjects with portraits of real persons and representations of familiar objects may seem, on first view, shocking to the taste, ridiculous anachronisms, and destructive of all solemnity and unity of feeling. Such, however, is |