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Her attitude, exquisite by the suggestion of tenderness and delicacy, is one that often reappears in the later work of the Pisan school for example, in the rough abozzamento in the Campo Santo at Pisa, above the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, and at Orvieto on the façade of the cathedral; but it has nowhere else been treated with the same sense of beauty.
Filippo, being restored to health after some months, was standing one morning in the Piazza di S. Maria del Fiore with Donato and other craftsmen, when they began to talk of antiquities in connection with sculpture, and Donato related how, when he was returning from Rome, he had made the journey through Orvieto, in order to see that marble façade of the Duomo, a work greatly celebrated, wrought by the hands of diverse masters and held to be something notable in those times; and how, in passing afterwards by Cortona, he entered the Pieve and saw a very beautiful ancient sarcophagus, whereon there was a scene in marble a rare thing then, when there had not been unearthed that abundance which has been found in our own day.
Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto, at once the latest works of the fifteenth century, and the latest works of an old man nurtured in the traditions of Benozzo Gozzoli and of Piero della Francesca, mark the beginning of the maturity and perfection of Italian art. From them Michael Angelo learns what he could not be taught even by his master Ghirlandajo, the grand and cold realist.
The discomfort of Perugia was luxury to what we found at Orvieto, and it was no longer May but December, when it is nearly as cold north of Rome as with us; and Rome was drawing us with her mighty magnet.
Prior to the middle of the fifteenth century, when this experiment was initiated, there had been various attempts by the State to provide credit facilities for the poor, but these need not detain us here, as they did not come to anything. The first of the montes pietatis was founded at Orvieto by the Franciscans in 1462, and after that year they spread rapidly.
We breathe in the presence of embodied consciences, submitting, like our own, to an unseen inevitable will. It would be doing Signorelli injustice at Orvieto to study only these great panels. The details with which he has filled all the vacant spaces above the chapel stalls and round the doorway, throw new light upon his power.
And the Catholic Church recorded this heavenly testimony to her chief mystery, in the Festa of the Corpus Domini, and the Fabric of Orvieto. And sending was made for John, and for all good labourers in marble; but Urban never saw a stone of the great cathedral laid.
'If Madame had only stayed at Orvieto! murmured Marie the maid, looking back at the city and then at her mistress. Eleanor smiled faintly and tapped the girl's hand. 'Rassure-toi, Marie! Remember how soon we made ourselves comfortable at the villa. Marie shook her much be-curled head.
In Gothic sculpture of an early date the Bible narrative is literally represented. God draws Eve from the open side of sleeping Adam. On the façade of Orvieto this motive is less altered than refined. The wound in Adam's side is visible, but Eve is coming from behind his sleeping body in obedience to the beckoning hand of her Creator.
It was the moment when painting was beginning to claim for the figures of real men and women the walls and vaulted spaces whence had hitherto glowered, with vacant faces and huge ghostlike eyes, mosaic figures, from their shimmering golden ground; the moment when the Pisan artists had sculptured solemnly draped madonnas and kings not quite unworthy of the carved sarcophagi which stood around them; the moment when, merging together old Byzantine traditions and Northern examples, the architects of Florence, Siena, and Orvieto conceived a style which made cathedrals into marvellous and huge reliquaries of marble, jasper, alabaster, and mosaics.
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