s of one simultaneous convulsed movement, one seething turmoil. In
detail, the horror is most dramatically rendered. The malignancy of the
devils, their brutal fury as they claw their prey, tear at their
throats, and wrench back their heads; the utter horror and anguish of
the victims, the confusion, the uproar, are given with a convincing
realistic force, which makes the scene ghastly and terrible. In most
representations of Hell, and especially of Devils, human imagination
fails in conveying any sense of real horror, even the earnest Duerer and
Botticelli treating them with a grotesqueness which shows how far they
were from any conviction of their reality. Signorelli is the only
painter of the Renaissance I can recall who has succeeded in giving a
savage sternness, a formidable brutishness to his fiends, which is very
far from grotesque, but is really appalling. These ferocious creatures
are of all colours, slate-blue, crude purple, heavy green, livid
mauve--sometimes of all these poisonous-looking colours fading one into
the other. Strong and malevolent, they triumph in their work of torture,
with a gloomy malignancy very different from the trifling malice of the
fiends he painted at Monte Oliveto. Above stand the three Archangels, in
armour, with half-drawn swords, menacing those who try to fly upward
instead of toward the flames of Hell. Two, in their hurry to escape
chastisement, let fall their prey; another, with great bat-wings which
cut the air like scythes, swoops down again into the chaos below.

[Illustration: [_Cathedral, Orvieto_

THE DAMNATION]

I suppose a mass of convulsed limbs has never been rendered in so
masterly a manner. The effect is so natural that one is inclined to
forget the difficulties Signorelli has so superbly overcome. But if one
considers in detail the different attitudes, the violent action of the
arms and legs, the contorted positions of the bodies--every muscle
either on the stretch or relaxed into a flaccid limpness,--the
foreshortened limbs twisted into every kind of unnatural posture, and
the complicated interweaving of the whole, one realises that it is
indeed his masterpiece, not only for the mood of terror and awe it
induces by its imaginative power, but for its marvellous rendering of
tumultuous movement, and the ease with which enormous technical
difficulties have been surmounted.

The portraits below are, according to Luzi, of Ovid and Horace, the four
medallions round t