Pinacoteca

Pinacoteca Review

One of Volterra's best-looking Renaissance buildings contains an impressive collection of Tuscan paintings arranged chronologically on two floors. Head straight for Room 12, with Luca Signorelli's (circa 1445-1523) Madonna and Child with Saints and Rosso Fiorentino's Deposition. Though painted just 30 years apart, they serve to illustrate the shift in style from the early-16th-century Renaissance ideals to full-blown mannerism: the balance of Signorelli's composition becomes purposefully skewed in Fiorentino's painting, where the colors go from vivid but realistic to emotively bright. Other important paintings in the small museum include Ghirlandaio's Apotheosis of Christ with Saints and a polyptych of the Madonna and Saints by Taddeo di Bartolo, which once hung in the Palazzo dei Priori.