last frescoes of the Monte Oliveto series indicate that an immense force
lay in reserve, waiting an opportunity for some wider and freer field of
action, than had hitherto presented itself. That opportunity now came,
when, at the age of fifty-nine, he was called upon to undertake the vast
work of these Orvieto frescoes. With the exception of the Sistine
Chapel, no such task has been achieved at so sustained a pitch of
imaginative power and technical excellence. Whether the subject stirred
his dramatic spirit, or whether the great spaces to be filled gave an
expanded sense of liberty to his genius, or whether his powers,
intellectual and physical, really were at the zenith of their strength;
whatever was the cause, he succeeded in executing a work which ranks
among the greatest monuments of the Renaissance, perhaps should even
rank as the very greatest.

Morelli writes: "These masterpieces 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."[60] And beside the dignity with which he has in these
frescoes elevated the body to an almost superhuman grandeur, his
conception of supernatural things is proportionately solemn and
impressive. It is impossible to look at the scenes without emotion, and
the mood evoked is due in a great measure to the earnest conviction with
which they are conceived. Signorelli, always a religious painter, in the
wider meaning of the word, seems here to assume an almost prophetic
attitude of warning, embodied, one might almost think, in the portrait
of himself, stern and menacing, standing sentinel-like over the work.

Vasari thus speaks of the frescoes: "In the principal church of
Orvieto--that of the Madonna--he completed with his own hand the chapel
which had been begun there by Fra Giovane da Fiesole; in which he
painted all the history of the end of the world, with strange fantastic
invention: Angels, demons, ruins, earthquakes, fires, miracles of
Antichrist, and many other of the like things; besides which, nudes,
foreshortened figures, and many beautiful designs; having pictured to
himself the terror which will be in that latest tremendous day. By means
of this he roused the spirit of all those who came after him in such a
way that since, they have found the difficulty of that manner easy.
Wherefore it does not surprise me that the works of Luca should ha