On the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Luca Signorelli (1450–1523), Cortona pays tribute to its most illustrious citizen with a major exhibition that restores full prominence to one of the leading figures of the Italian Renaissance. A painter of extraordinary expressive power and a bold innovator of pictorial language, Signorelli was highly esteemed by Vasari and proved to be a fundamental point of reference for artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo, playing a decisive role in the development of art between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Hosted at Palazzo Casali, home of the MAEC – Museo dell’Accademia Etrusca e della Città di Cortona, the exhibition traces the entire artistic career of the Master through a carefully curated selection of works of exceptional quality, on loan from prestigious Italian and international museums and collections. The exhibition highlights the narrative strength, powerful draftsmanship, iconographic originality and remarkable chromatic intensity that define Signorelli’s unmistakable artistic language.

The exhibition also engages in dialogue with the works by Luca Signorelli held in the MAEC’s permanent collection: the celebrated tondo, the Adoration of the Shepherds, and the two wooden panels. These masterpieces bear witness to the artist’s enduring bond with his native city and can be admired by visitors at any time, beyond the duration of the temporary exhibition.

Alongside important restorations and significant new scholarly insights, the exhibition forms part of a broader project of territorial enhancement, engaging in dialogue with Signorelli-themed itineraries in the city and across the Tuscan-Umbrian area. A unique opportunity to rediscover, in his native city, an artist of “peregrine intellect and spirit,” capable of uniting formal rigor with profound visual poetry.