A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 175. Signorelli. Madonna.—Uffizi.

In the year 1500, being nearly sixty, he found the real use for his truculent art. He was called to paint in the Chapel of S. Brixio, in the Cathedral of Orvieto. The subject was the Last Judgment. More than fifty years earlier Fra Angelico had begun the work with angel choirs in the vaults. With a far different temper Signorelli continued the task. At the entrance and back of the Chapel he showed mankind scourged by the final plagues. In the four arched spaces at the sides he set The Preaching of Antichrist, a sinister scene detailed with all the circumstantiality of the Early Renaissance. For the three remaining scenes, the Resurrection of the Dead, Figure [176], the Condemnation of the Sinful, Figure [177], and the Reward of the Just, he invented new modes both of interpretation and of composition. How far we are from the solemn assizes of Giotto or the garden and labyrinth motives of Fra Angelico! In every case we have in the lunette celestial figures, or at least supernal, while below we have swarming masses of nude folk, bewildered at the forgotten light, aspiring heavenwards or shrinking from the clutches of the fiends.

What distinguishes these frescoes is a magnificently just matter-of-factness. Only one question is raised by the artist. Given the literal truth of the Book of Revelations, how would the last judgment look, and how would one feel if he were indeed there? So he reasons it out—the struggle of the skeletons to push up to the light, their reinvestiture successively with sinews, muscles and skin, the embarrassment as a half assembled body vainly seeks recognition. And all this he contrasts with the confident, strong bearing of the archangels above. Again in the Ascent of the Just to Heaven, the aspiration is chiefly physical, magnificently so. These clean strong bodies chiefly wish to escape the corruption from which the last trump has summoned them. And even the guardian angels are less tender than jubilant at the thought of fit recruits to replenish St. Michael’s celestial militia. Equally the damned wince, not from conscience, but from physical dread of the chains and claws and the imminence of the eternal fires.

Fig. 176. Luca Signorelli. The General Resurrection.—Cathedral, Orvieto.

Fig. 177. Luca Signorelli. The Souls of the Damned.—Cathedral, Orvieto.

This sturdy, upright art seems hardly Italian. The spirit of it is ruthless and Northern. It mitigates nothing, tells pretty much everything, presents the body in its ugliness, disregards obvious considerations of style. Yet as a successful blend of a vast technical experiment in anatomy with an honest and powerful effort of imagination, this is one of the most remarkable achievements of the Italian Renaissance. It has little of the Italian nobility, but it powerfully influenced those who had. Perugino and Raphael imitated Signorelli’s orderly arrangement of his scenes in a double, vertical order, and Michelangelo fed his dream of a heroic world of splendid nudity from the drastic visions of Signorelli. Over-rich and over-emphatic as Signorelli is, he is also an elemental, tonic power. No one is quite the same after a visit to the Chapel of S. Brixio.

If Signorelli was the greatest character in Umbria before Raphael, Pietro Perugino was the finest intelligence and taste. He was born in 1446 at Città della Pieve and at nine years old was put with a poor Perugian painter. His early activity is matter only of ingenious conjecture.[^[66]] There is an ambiguous range of pictures variously ascribed to him and to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, a difficult and rather unimportant problem which I willingly let alone. What is certain is that in his early twenties Perugino was studying with Verrocchio at Florence alongside of Leonardo da Vinci. By 1481 and 1482 Perugino emerges artistically full-grown in the Sistine Chapel.

His superiority, as shown in the fresco of the Giving of the Keys to Peter, Figure [118], and in numerous works of his forty-two remaining years, is so uniform and almost monotonous that its greatness has until recently passed unnoticed. Only such critics as Mr. Berenson and Professor Wölfflin have done him full justice. He worked upon perfectly clear and conscious ideals of simplicity, symmetry, and spaciousness; in all of which he took issue with his times. Rejecting the picturesque richness and confusion of the Early Renaissance, he took counsel of the Byzantine painters and of Fra Angelico at San Marco. They taught him the worth of simple geometrical forms of figure composition, and how to sacrifice details to broad effects. That his groups disposed in simple pyramids, oblongs, or ovals should not seem too bare, he cunningly varied the positions of the figures, thus relieving the severity of the underlying symmetry. Every tilted head, pointed foot and swaying thigh has its precise compositional value. As for the figures, there is no strenuousness of draughtsmanship, they are simply good enough. A principle of artistic economy, alien to the spirit of the moment, rules here as elsewhere.