THE first impression of Orvieto is unforgettable. The city is perched on a high outcrop, defended by perpendicular cliffs which lour above the valley of the Paglia. The site inevitably attracted the Etruscans, but Orvieto was not, it seems, a town of importance until the sixth century. In the late medieval period, rival families and the papacy vied for control; only in 1450 did the latter finally prevail.
The great striped Gothic cathedral, which was begun in 1290 to celebrate a miracle of 1263, can be seen from the valley. But nonetheless the sheer façade comes as a surprise. The Sienese Lorenzo Maitani superintended the project from 1310 for two decades and oversaw the execution of the remarkable reliefs which encrust the pilasters of the lower tier. The much-restored rose window was designed by the great Florentine artist Andrea Orcagna.
No Gothic interior in Italy is more exilarating in its sense of space. In the left aisle is a frescoed Madonna and Child of 1425 by Gentile da Fabriano, most refined of the late Gothic painters of central Italy. To the left of the crossing is the trapezoidal Cappella del Corporale, decorated like the choir with much restored murals by the local late fourteenth-century master, Ugolino di Prete Ilario; on the altar, usually invisible within its tabernacle, is one of the great masterpieces of medieval metalwork, Ugolino di Vieri’s reliquary of 1337–8, which contains the Corporale. That it cost the almost incredible sum of 1,274 florins demonstrates how much this relic meant to the Orvietans.
Cathedral, façade projected by Lorenzo Maitani, 1310.
The tourist of today comes to see the Cappella di San Brizio, the Cappella Nuova, opposite. Work on this began in 1409. Fra Angelico was enlisted to decorate the chapel and in 1447 completed, with the help of assistants, two of the eight sections of the vault, Christ in Glory and Prophets, works of unprecedented scale in his oeuvre. The frate was then summoned to Rome and did not return to Orvieto. In 1489 Perugino received a contract to complete the scheme. He did nothing, and a year later his contemporary and erstwhile associate, Luca Signorelli, was called in.
While the scale and character of Signorelli’s frescoes of the vault were influenced by those of Fra Angelico, his great murals on the walls must have seemed startling in their novelty. The Preaching of the Antichrist, the first compartment on the left wall, represents a development from the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, in which the artist had collaborated; as in the Sistine murals there are obvious portraits. Signorelli’s imagination astonishes in the detail of the End of the World, which flanks the entrance arch. Yet more extraordinary are the paired frescoes of the right wall, the Resurrection of the Flesh and the Damned: in the first, two angels blast on their trumpets as the virtuous rise from the dead to their summons; in the second, devils are in undisputed control, the damned concentrated in a heaving scrum, their screams and laments in vain. The cycle continues in the same vein at either side of the altar, with angels respectively despatching sinners to Hell and guiding the elect to Paradise; this concludes, in the second section of the left wall, with the Calling of the Elect to Heaven, in which the virtuous are marshalled by a cloud of airborne angels. No other painter of his generation could have acquitted himself on Signorelli’s terms; and although few related studies survive, we know enough about his methods to be left in no doubt that every significant figure was carefully worked out from the human model. Signorelli, like Fra Angelico, was a visionary who understood that plausible observation would convince his audience.
Cathedral: Luca Signorelli, Lamentation, fresco (detail).
The lower tier of the decoration of the chapel also calls for close examination. The elaborate dado includes half-length representations of poets, including Homer, Empedocles, Lucan, Horace, Ovid, Virgil and Dante. Each is surrounded by four grisaille roundels, which read as reliefs and have a spontaneous vigour. On the right wall is a recessed chapel with what is in effect a fictive sculptured altarpiece of the Lamentation flanked by two saints, Faustino and Pietro Parenzo, who were buried in the chapel. With characteristic acuity Signorelli shows Christ being carried to the sepulchre in a fictive bas-relief in the background.
The Cappella di San Brizio is in every sense an overwhelming experience. Nothing else in Orvieto is on the same heroic plane. But there are other distinguished things to see. Beside the cathedral are the Palazzi Papali, with a key work by Simone Martini, his Monaldeschi polyptych. On the opposite side of the town is San Domenico, with the partly reconstructed tomb of Cardinal Guglielmo di Braye – who died in 1282 – by Arnolfo di Cambio, greatest among the followers of the Pisano. At the north-east end of the town, by the castle, is the remarkable Pozzo Rocca. This great well was excavated at the order of Pope Clement VII, who took refuge in Orvieto in 1527–8 after the Sack of Rome. It was designed by the Florentine architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; there are two stairs, each of 248 steps. Descending one of these, it is not difficult to understand why this most satisfying masterpiece of civil engineering took almost twenty years to complete.
