Holy family with saints Zachary, Elizabeth and little John

Luca Signorelli's Holy Family with Saints Zachary, Elizabeth, and the infant John, painted around 1510, dates from the final years of this Umbrian master's career. After completing his famous frescoes of the Last Judgment at Orvieto Cathedral (1499-1504), Signorelli continued producing altarpieces and devotional works. This painting is now in Berlin's Gemäldegalerie. Luca Signorelli, trained under Piero della Francesca and active in Umbria and central Italy across the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, was one of the most original painters of his generation. His mastery of the male nude figure in dynamic action — developed through sustained practice in the fresco cycles at Loreto, Cortona, and above all in the Last Judgment cycle at Orvieto Cathedral — was the direct precursor of Michelangelo's treatment of the human body in the Sistine Chapel. His influence on the development of Renaissance figure painting was fundamental, and his position between Piero's geometric clarity and Michelangelo's dynamic power makes him one of the essential links in the chain of Italian Renaissance art.

Signorelli's characteristic sculptural modeling of figures is evident in the robust, firmly outlined forms, with strong light picking out muscular anatomy even through drapery—a hallmark of his approach to the human body.