Museum Buys Huge Renaissance Work

The San Diego Museum of Art has filled a gap in its Renaissance art collection with the acquisition of a “monumental” 16th-Century painting, “The Coronation of the Virgin.”

The Luca Signorelli oil on a wooden panel depicts the Virgin Mary being crowned by Jesus Christ as they are blessed by God the Father. Angels, some playing musical instruments, surround the two principals.

Museum director Steven Brezzo, who announced the acquisition Wednesday, said he had been looking for “something quite large and grand” for the museum’s Italian Renaissance collection, which he called “one of our collection’s strengths.”

“This painting of luxurious scale and richness is a significant work by a major Italian Renaissance master,” Brezzo said. Earlier this summer, the museum acquired “Portrait of a Girl” by Bartolome Esteban Murillo, an addition to the museum’s other area of strength, the Spanish Baroque period.

Signorelli, one of the painters chosen by Pope Sixtus IV to paint the Sistine Chapel frescoes in Vatican City, “bridges a gap in our collection between the low and the high Renaissance,” a museum spokesman said. Brezzo described Signorelli as “somewhat of a primitive, not classically representational.”

Signorelli was one of the first painters to incorporate nudes in religious paintings. But he is most important, perhaps, for his influence on a younger generation of painters. Raphael and Michelangelo found artistic inspiration from Signorelli’s innovations.

Signorelli’s masterpiece, the frescoes he painted in the Chapel of San Brizio at the cathedral in Orvieto, features muscular, vigorous figurative work, especially in “The Preaching of Antichrist.”

A native of Cortona, Italy, Signorelli (circa 1445-1523) was commissioned by an art patron to paint “The Coronation of the Virgin” in 1508. The lunette, a crescent-shaped work, crowned a huge altarpiece in the Church of San Francesco at Roccacontrada, now known as Arcevia, in northeastern Italy. The altarpiece was dismantled and sold after the Napoleonic suppression of monastic churches in 1811.

The lunette, which measures more than four feet by seven feet, had been in a private British collection since 1860. It was cleaned, Brezzo said, before a recent display at a New York gallery. “The cleaning has brought out the painting’s vivid colors,” Brezzo said, particularly the rich green robes and red garments worn by Christ and the Virgin. “The Coronation” is more serene than Signorelli’s famous work at the Chapel of San Brizio.

The $500,000 price of the lunette was covered by the museum’s purchase fund and a $100,000 grant from the Parker Foundation in San Diego.