Cathedral of Orvieto

Cathedral of Orvieto by Esther Singleton

Cathedral of Orvieto* by Esther Singleton presents an extended literary and art-historical meditation on the Duomo of Orvieto, drawing substantially on John Addington Symonds's essay, and moves through three interlocking subjects: the city's geography and geological drama, the cathedral's architectural and sculptural heritage, and the frescoes of Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli that crown its Chapel of San Brizio. Orvieto itself is introduced as a town perched on a volcanic cube of tufa rising abruptly from the desolate Paglia valley, halfway between Ficulle and Viterbo on the road from Siena to Rome. The landscape is severe and elemental — barren river beds, vast Apennine ranges swelling tier on tier — and the cathedral's marble façade, glimpsed from a distance at sunrise, appears calm and solemn against this geology of fire and stone. The Duomo's origins are traced to Pope Urban IV and the Miracle of Bolsena of the mid-thirteenth century. A doubting Bohemian priest, while celebrating mass at Bolsena, witnessed blood issue from a consecrated wafer in the form of the five wounds of Christ. Urban, then residing at Orvieto, received the priest and the miraculous linen, and commissioned the cathedral as a monument to the doctrine of transubstantiation — a doctrine whose reassertion was simultaneously a political maneuver against the reforming theology of Abbot Joachim of Fiore, whose Eternal Gospel had threatened papal authority by preaching spiritual progression beyond the institutional church. The architect Lorenzo Maitani of Siena provided designs for the building in the Italian pointed Gothic manner — a style that, the text argues, was never fully naturalized in Italy. Unlike Northern Gothic, with its intricate groining, vast windows, and spires suited to fog and cold, the Orvieto cathedral achieves beauty through surface decoration: horizontal bands of black and white marble on its sides, and a façade of extraordinary ornamental richness. That façade — a decorative screen bearing little structural relation to the building behind it — is covered with white marble mellowed to gold, inlaid with mosaics, agates, and Alexandrine glasswork, every inch given over to invention and precious material. The façade's sculptural program is attributed to Giovanni and Andrea Pisano, sons and pupils of Nicola Pisano, whose work the text identifies as a decisive turning point in the history of Italian art. Nicola, studying a Greek sarcophagus cast ashore at Pisa — the bas-relief of Phaedra and Hippolytus — absorbed the elevated tranquility of classical form and transmitted it into a medieval Christian idiom. The four marble tablets of bas-relief at Orvieto trace Biblical history from the Creation to the Last Judgment and established compositional conventions that Ghiberti, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Signorelli would all follow. The evolution of the figure of God the Creator — from the youthful, dignified Christ-figure of the Pisani, through Ghiberti's older patriarch in clouds, to the Platonic Demiurge of Michelangelo — illustrates how those germinal designs were progressively transfigured by successive artistic intellects. Inside the cathedral, colossal statues by Ippolito Scalza, a native of Orvieto, line the nave and lead toward the high altar. The text then moves into the Chapel of San Brizio in the south transept, where a live congregation of rural poor — vineyard workers, women with infants, old men, shepherds — kneels before a curtained altar. The object of their devotion is not the chapel's magnificent art but the Madonna di San Brizio, a blackened, wonder-working icon jeweled and cased in glass, credited with protection against ague, difficult childbirth, storms, and marital infidelity. This scene of living popular piety frames the art-historical reflection that follows. Fra Angelico came first to the chapel, kneeling in prayer before mounting the scaffold to paint the vaulted ceiling: the Judge, the crowned Virgin, the Martyrs, and the Apostles in expectation of Judgment. Luca Signorelli followed, covering the walls with scenes of the Last Days — the preaching of Antichrist, the Resurrection, Hell, and Paradise. The text asks why Signorelli's fame has remained disproportionate to his achievement, and answers that his remoteness from major centers and the subsequent eclipse of all predecessors by Michelangelo have obscured him. Yet Vasari observed that Michelangelo imitated Signorelli's manner, and the essay argues this connection is readily visible: both artists rejected ornamental color and adventitious decoration, both worked in fresco on subjects of gravity and elevation, both pursued anatomical mastery and intellectual abstraction. What Signorelli began at Orvieto, Michelangelo completed in the Sistine Chapel. The text concludes as the vesper service ends, the congregation disperses into the nave, and the organ plays a Verdi melody where Signorelli's painted angels had seemed only moments before to sound their trumpets — a juxtaposition of the quotidian and the sublime that encapsulates the cathedral's layered life across centuries.

By Esther Singleton · First published 1903 · Genre: Art History, Architectural History, History · 4,624 words

First lines

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

On the road from Siena to Rome, half-way between Ficulle and Viterbo, / is the town of Orvieto. Travellers often pass it in the night-time. / Few stop there, for the place is old and dirty and its inns are / indifferent. But none who see it even from a distance can fail to be / struck with its imposing aspect, as it rises from the level plain upon / its mass of rock among the Apennines.

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cathedral · architecture · Gothic · Italy · medieval · religious art · art history · Italian architecture · travel guide · Renaissance · frescoes · sculpture

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