The Sistine Chapel of Orvieto: Luca Signorelli's Frescoes in the San Brizio Chapel

Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

On his many trips to Rome, Michelangelo often stopped in the Umbrian town of Orvieto, which is located about halfway between Florence and Rome. There in the San Brizio Chapel in Orvieto Cathedral, Michelangelo would have seen one of the most extraordinary fresco cycles of the Italian Renaissance - Luca Signorelli’s “Last Judgment.” Painted between 1499 and 1504 (shortly before Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel Ceiling), Signorelli’s frescoes represent the first monumental celebration of the nude form of the Italian Renaissance. Angels and demons are engaged in a dramatic struggle for the souls of the saved and the damned, which are embodied in idealized male and female nudes. Signorelli’s beautiful figures left an indelible impression on Michelangelo, who, only a few years later, would produce his own triumph of the nude in the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and then again decades later in his own “Last Judgment.”