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It brings vividly before our eyes magnificent expensive Signorelli and his meanly living comrade, each of them mighty masters of a terrible and noble style, passionate lovers of the nude, devoted to masculine types of beauty, but widely and profoundly severed by differences in their personal tastes and habits.
The olives tossed their filmy boughs in twilight underneath his windows, sighing and shuddering, with a sheen in them as eery as that of willows by some haunted mere. The great attraction to students of Italian art in the convent of Monte Oliveto is a large square cloister, covered with wall-paintings by Luca Signorelli and Giovannantonio Bazzi, surnamed Il Sodoma.
The frescoes of Signorelli, the bas-reliefs of the Pisani, the statuary of Lo Scalza and Mosca, the tarsia of the choir stalls, the Alexandrine work and mosaics of the façade, the bronzes placed upon its brackets, and the wrought acanthus scrolls of its superb pilasters these are the objects for inexhaustible wonder in the cathedral of Orvieto.
As Landor is distinguished by concentration above all the English poets who have made trial of the classic Muse, so Mantegna holds a place apart among Italian painters because of his stern Roman self-control. Signorelli, on the contrary, made his mark by boldness, pushing experiment almost beyond the verge of truth, and approaching Michael Angelo in the hardihood of his endeavour to outdo nature.
The portrait he has painted of himself in the first of the frescoes, as well as that in the Opera del Duomo, show us a man in the very prime of life, full of energy and determination. Four years at least, Signorelli laboured at these frescoes, although not consecutively, as we shall presently see. He had with him as assistant his son Polidoro, and perhaps Girolamo Genga, and other pupils.
It also gives us a glimpse into Michelangelo's workshop at the moment when he was blocking out one of the bound Captives at the Louvre. It seems from what follows in the letter that Michelangelo had attempted to recover the money through his brother Buonarroto, but that Signorelli refused to acknowledge his debt. The Capitano wrote that he was sure it had been discharged.
It is probable that he had thought out the general scheme of the frescoes, and that Signorelli only carried out his intention in working the paintings into one great whole Christ in Heaven, surrounded by Angels, Apostles, Martyrs, Virgins, Patriarchs and Fathers of the Church, witnessing from on high the execution of divine justice below.
It is chiefly in detail that the great qualities of Signorelli show themselves. The rest of the walls of the large cloister are painted with twenty-seven subjects by Sodoma, showing the youth and hermit-life of the saint, and continuing, after the series by Signorelli, with his miracles and his old age.
The two medallions on the sides of the window contain, one the Archangel Gabriel with the lily of the Annunciation, the other a very beautiful group of Raphael and Tobias, both by Signorelli himself.
The Florentines with fair and pleasant gardens; the Umbrians with spacious colonnades, distant landscapes, and rare skies; the Venetians with fruits and garlands of foliage and fruit, and even vegetables, if they had a particular regard for them, as Crivelli had for the cucumber. One painter only before this time decorated his pictures with nude human figures, Luca Signorelli.
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