Doomsday, Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell.[208]

It is a gloomy chapel in the Gothic cathedral of that forlorn Papal
city--gloomy by reason of bad lighting, but more so because of the
terrible shapes with which Signorelli has filled it[209]. In no other work
of the Italian Renaissance, except in the Sistine Chapel, has so much
thought, engaged upon the most momentous subjects, been expressed with
greater force by means more simple and with effect more overwhelming.
Architecture, landscape, and decorative accessories of every kind, the
usual padding of _quattrocento_ pictures, have been discarded from the
main compositions. The painter has relied solely upon his power of
imagining and delineating the human form in every attitude, and under the
most various conditions. Darting like hawks or swallows through the air,
huddling together to shun the outpoured vials of the wrath of God,
writhing with demons on the floor of Hell, struggling into new life from
the clinging clay, standing beneath the footstool of the Judge, floating
with lute and viol on the winds of Paradise, kneeling in prayer, or
clasping "inseparable hands with joy and bliss in overmeasure for
ever"--these multitudes of living beings, angelic, diabolic, bestial,
human, crowd the huge spaces of the chapel walls. What makes the
impression of controlling doom the more appalling, is that we comprehend
the drama in its several scenes, while the chief actor, the divine Judge,
at whose bidding the cherubs sound their clarions, and the dead arise, and
weal and woe are portioned to the saved and damned, is Himself
unrepresented.[210] 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. The ostensible motive for this elaborate ornamentation is contained
in the portraits of six poets, who are probably Homer, Virgil, Lucan,
Horace, Ovid, and Dante, _il sesto tra cotanto senno_.[211] But the
portraits themselves, though vigorously conceived and remarkable for bold
foreshortening, are the least part of the whole design. Its originality
consists in the arabesques, medallions, and _chiaroscuro_ bas-reliefs,
where the human form, treated as absolutely plastic, supplies the sole
decorative element. The pi