the same reason for which he had excused himself the month
before from serving as Priore in his native town, "being absent at a
distance of over forty miles,"[15] probably at Volterra. He painted
there in this year three pictures, all of which are still in the city;
the "Annunciation" and the "Madonna and Saints," dated 1491, and the
fresco of "S. Jerome" on the walls of the Municipio.

The next notice of importance is of the year 1497, when he received the
commission from the monks of S. Benedict to fresco the walls of their
cloister at Monte Oliveto.[16] Here he painted eight episodes from the
life of the patron saint, leaving the rest of the work to be completed
by Sodoma. Notwithstanding this task he found time, for four months of
this very year, to serve among the Priori in Cortona, and accepted,
besides, a fresh appointment as one of the Revisori degli Argenti.

In the following year he was in Siena, where he painted the altar-piece
for the Bicchi family, the wings of which are now in Berlin.

[Illustration: [_Museo del Duomo, Orvieto_

PORTRAIT OF SIGNORELLI]

We have now reached the most important time in Signorelli's life, the
year in which he received the commission for the decoration of the
Cappella Nuova in the Cathedral of Orvieto. Fifty years before, the roof
had been begun by Fra Angelico, and ever since he went away, leaving it
unfinished, the authorities had been undecided to whom to give the
important work. Benozzo Gozzoli had begged for it; Perugino, it is said,
had refused it; and now, in 1499, perhaps influenced to the choice by
the success of the Monte Oliveto frescoes, they entrusted the work to
Signorelli. Wishing first, however, to test his powers, they limited the
commission to the completion of the vaulting, and it was not till the
following year that they handed over to him the rest of the chapel, to
be painted with the story of the Last Judgment. With this dramatic
subject, and in these great spaces of the walls he had for the first
time a free field for the wide sweep of his brush, and the force of his
vivid imagination. The conceptions of Dante inspired, but did not
trammel him, and he had sufficient strength to make the great drama his
own, and to compel it to serve his ends in the display of the human
frame in its most vigorous aspects. The portrait he has painted of
himself in the first of the frescoes, as well as that in the Opera del
Duomo, show us a man in the very prime of life,