Luca Signorelli, 'Man on a Ladder', 1504-5

This fragment of a larger painting shows an elderly man, almost bald but for a few tufts of white hair, gingerly climbing down the rungs of a spindly ladder. His grip is obstructed by a pair of pincers, which he has used to extract the nails that secured Christ to the Cross, making his descent all the more precarious.

The character’s rugged features, which Signorelli has studied from life, lend him an air of pragmatism that was probably useful for such a gruesome task. The portrayal of his body is also remarkable, capturing the contortion and weight distribution required for a man of his size to descend such a tall and narrow ladder. Signorelli was noted in his time for his expert depiction of the human body and his ability to paint it convincingly in a variety of complex poses without losing a sense of its solidity and weight.

The panel was part of an altarpiece showing the Lamentation of Christ at the Foot of the Cross made for the high altar of the church of Sant'Agostino in Matelica, a town in the Italian region of the Marche. Part of the haloed head of a saint, probably Saint John the Evangelist, is visible at the lower right edge. Like many altarpieces from Italian churches, it was probably cut up to create a number of separate paintings for sale in the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century. We know of other fragments which are now in collections across the world.

Giovannantonio di Luca di Paolo, the picture’s patron, had obviously been impressed by a picture of the same subject that Signorelli made for Santa Margherita, a church in his home town of Cortona (Museo Diocesano, Cortona), as he asked him to produce a similar image. Piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of the remaining fragments reveals that the Matelica picture was probably very similar to its model, but the man on the ladder was a new addition to the composition.