Orvieto Duomo: Luca Signorelli

   

 

 

The facade of Orvieto's Duomo is justly famous but Edward Hutton found much to admire in the interior, especially the magnificent frescoes by Luca Signorelli in the S. Brisio chapel.

Within, the great church is generally found to be a disappointment. Of course, the glorious façade has no co-ordination with it, but this great bare Romanesque interior, full of light as it is, spacious too, recommends itself to me, and I have come to love it for just these two Latin qualities—spaciousness and light. It is 260 feet long and nearly 100 feet wide, divided into three naves by ten columns and two piers, black and white in colour, with fine capitals. The ten chapels along the nave are semicircular and there is a door in both aisles. The choir and the sanctuary are higher than the nave and the two transept chapels are later additions. The simple coloured roof is unpretentious, even charming. …

The great chapel on the left, which with the equally large chapel on the right forms a sort of transept, is the Cappella del Corporale. The chapel is covered with frescoes by Ugolino di Prete Ilario, telling the story of the miracle of Bolsena. In a magnificent reliquary over the altar is venerated the Corporal of the miracle stained with Christ’s blood, and for this the chapel was built in 1350. The reliquary, which is not easy to see, is perhaps the finest example in Italy of medieval goldsmith’s work, covered with enamel by Ugolino di Maestro Vieri. It is of silver-gilt repousse and chased, architectural in the form of the façade of the Cathedral, with a wealth of translucent enamels which tell the story of the miracle of Bolsena. …

On the opposite side of the church, forming as it were the right transept, is the large Cappella Nuova, now called the Cappella della Madonna di San Brisio, from the fourteenth century altarpiece of the Madonna and Child enthroned with angels. …

 

In the last year but one of the fifteenth century Luca Signorelli was appointed to decorate the chapel, and he filled it with the greatest and most dramatic works even he was ever to create; indeed, except in the Sistine Chapel, no such work is to be found in Italy for imaginative power and technical excellence. “These masterpieces,” wrote Morelli, “appear to me unequalled in the art of the fifteenth century, for to no other contemporary painter was it given to endow the human frame with a like degree of passion, vehemence and strength.”

Image by David Orme

Signorelli filled the vaulting left vacant by Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli with figures of the Apostles, the symbols of the Passion, the Fathers of the Church, and so forth, but below he has painted in seven frescoes of the end of the world: the Coming of the antichrist, the Crowning of the Elect, the resurrection, the Judgment, Heaven, Hell and the Destruction of the World. …

Image by David Orme

Nothing more extraordinarily thoughtful and subtle, nothing more masterly than the antichrist is to be found in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. So like to Christ as indeed always to be mistaken for Him from a distance, Antichrist has all the beauty, all the cynical hatred of mankind, which listens to him in adoration that, after Luca has suggested it to us, we might expect. It is hardly necessary, one might say, for the devil to whisper to him; in his heart all the cruelty and villainy of the universe have been sown and have come to flower. Opposite the fresco of the Resurrection, with its huge naked angels sounding their death-destroying trumpets, decked with the banner of the Cross, crushes us beneath its tremendous power. Visions as splendid as those of Dante dawn upon him—the Punishment of the Wicked, the Reward of the Blessed, and Paradise, Heaven, and Hell. With his overwhelming vision as our companion, we walk the streets of Orvieto, ever finding it necessary to return again the Cappella della Madonna di S. Brisio, where above the poets of Greece and Rome and Italy we see the tragedy of our world, the drama of the soul of man.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 135-138.

Orvieto and Its Cathedral

  

 

 

Edward Hutton tells the story of Orvieto and its Cathedral in great detail. Here is the first of two posts.

Image by David Orme

D’Annunzio has well described Orvieto: “Imagine a rock in the middle of a melancholy valley, and on the top of the rock a city, so deathly silent as to give the impression of being uninhabited—every window closed—grass growing in the dusty grey streets—a Capuchin friar crosses a piazza—a priest descends from a closed carriage in front of a hospital, all in black, and with a decrepit old servant to open the door; here a tower against the rain-sodden clouds—there a clock slowly striking the hour, and suddenly at the end of a street, a miracle—the Duomo!”

 

Peace and silence: that is what the traveller will find in Orvieto, for far from the contemporary uproar she still dreams of the miracle of Bolsena which her Cathedral was built to commemorate. …

Image by David Orme

The Cathedral … is the most beautiful in Umbria, and the flaming façade is perhaps the loveliest in Italy. The church stands on a marble platform in a wide piazza. Facing it are the Palazzo Faina and the Palazzo dell’ Opera del Duomo, founded in 1359, with a great Baroque façade of the seventeenth century, then the Ospedale. 

 

The glory of the Duomo is of course the façade, which was perhaps first imagined by Arnolfo di Cambio with but a single and central pediment or gable, but in 1310 the Sienese master, Lorenzo Maitani, gave it the three triangular pediments we see, and its marvellous colour and decoration in mosaic and sculpture, between 1327 and 1337; and his work was continued by Andrea Pisani, Orcagna and others till 1388. The uppermost story was added by Antonio Federighi of Siena (1444-90). 

 

The sculptures in bas-relief on the façade were executed between 1310 and 1327, in part by Lorenzo Maitani and in part under his supervision. They belong therefore to the golden age of the art of Siena, the age of Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti. They are perhaps the greatest achievement of the Sienese school of sculpture and are among the most lovely things in Italy. …

The whole story of the Creation and the Fall of Man is represented on this façade.  A little conventionally, you might say, these Sienese artists deal with their art, and yet what pathos in that figure of Adam whom God approaches so eagerly, so graciously in the garden. The astonished angels wait, with how profound an agitation, for this new thing. And again, when that deep sleep fell upon our father, and God with blessing—for He does bless her—draws woman from his side, and two angels hesitate in the garden among the trees, the one seeming to tell the other of all that has gone before, when Adam lay a marvellous shape of dust waiting the touch of the finger of God; as you look on the sublime scene the picture of Michelangelo comes to you as he painted this very thing on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. There Adam, half alive, lies over the world and stretches out his finger—how languidly—to touch the finger of God; he is almost unconscious, still wrapped round by dreams, yet a touch of the finger-tips will suffice to awaken him to life itself, and all that God holds, woman and the future, in the fold of His garment. But here Christ is the chief figure in that act of creation, God the Father being represented by a hand, while the Holy Spirit in the form of a Dove with outspread wings hovers over the waters and the earth and the stars.

Sienese work though this is, there is energy and realism in that figure of Adam where he stands with Eve for a moment beneath the Tree of Knowledge, and God, with a kind of severity, forbids them to eat of that fruit. Eve listens with a curious meekness, an easy acquiescence. But Adam stands at his full height and looks God in the eyes as a beloved son, and really understands that this tree which he touched with his fingers bears the forbidden fruit. Here is a poem as noble as Milton’s Paradise Lost.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 131-134.