m strength is translated into
swiftness:--these are the heralds, sentinels, musicians, executioners, and
messengers of the celestial court; and each class is distinguished by
appropriate physical characteristics. At the other end of the scale,
forming a fourth grade, we may mention the depraved types of humanity
chosen for his demons--those greenish, reddish, ochreish fiends of the
"Inferno," whom Signorelli created by exaggerating the more grotesque
qualities of the nude developed in his arabesques. We thus obtain four
several degrees of form: the demoniac, the abstract nude, the adolescent
beauty of young men copied from choice models, and the angelic.

Except in his angels, Signorelli was comparatively indifferent to what is
commonly considered beauty. He was not careful to select his models, or to
idealise their type. The naked human body, apart from facial distinction
or refinement of form, contented him. Violent contrasts of light and
shadow, accentuating the anatomical structure with rough and angular
decision, give the effect of illustrative diagrams to his studies. Harmony
of proportion and the magic of expression are sacrificed to energy
emergent in a powerful physique. Redundant life, in sinewy limbs, in the
proud carriage of the head upon the neck, in the sway of the trunk
backward from the reins, the firmly planted calves and brawny thighs, the
thick hair, broad shoulders, spare flanks, and massive gluteal muscles of
a man of twenty-two or upwards, whose growth has been confined to the
development of animal force, was what delighted him. Yet there is no
coarseness or animalism properly so called in his style. He was attracted
by the marvellous mechanism of the human frame--its goodliness regarded as
the most highly organised of animate existences.

Owing, perhaps, to this exclusive predilection for organic life,
Signorelli was not great as a colourist. His patches of blues and reds in
the frescoes of Monte Oliveto are oppressively distinct; his use of dull
brown for the shading of flesh imparts a disagreeable heaviness to his
best modelled forms; nor did he often attain in his oil pictures to that
grave harmony we admire in his "Last Supper" at Cortona. The world of
light and colour was to him a comparatively untravelled land. It remained
for other artists to raise these elements of pictorial expression to the
height reached by Signorelli in his treatment of the nude.

Before quitting the frescoes at Orvie