Luca Signorelli, Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist (detail), 1499-1502
Frescos of San Brizio Chapel by Luca Signorelli is one the craziest artistic expressions of the early Renaissance. It’s a massive work and the detail above is just a small although a central fragment. There is an article about the frescos in the New York Review of Book – When the Antichrist Came to Orvieto.
UPDATE: This is only known depiction of the Antichrist in the Italian art. The Antichrist looks like the Christ on the podium. The Satan gives instructions to Antichrist but he appears to merge with him and it’s no longer possible to tell if the left hand belongs to the Satan or the Antichrist. To the left there is a Jew in a green hat and a purse with two stars of David. The Jew is giving money to a prostitute? The article says the following about the Jews of Orvieto:
“There were a few dozen Jews living in Signorelli’s Orvieto, mingled in with the local population, many of them professionals, working as doctors, merchants, and moneylenders. Some of them were refugees from Spain, like Moïsé de Blanis, at the time Orvieto’s most prominent physician and manufacturer of wool mattresses, as well as a banker, rabbi, and scholar. Signorelli’s fresco suggests that the Jewish presence in Orvieto, and especially in Orvieto’s economy, is a malevolent one; for example, the blonde woman who takes money from the fur-clad Jew is barefoot, with uncovered head—anything but respectable. The coin he proffers is, in effect, the price of her virtue.
Just behind the Antichrist, a knot of friars argues over an open Bible. They wear the habits of all the major orders: gray-clad Franciscans, black-clad Benedictines and Augustinians, and, in the center of it all, a Dominican in white robe and black mantle who seems to be guiding the discussion. For most of the previous century, preaching friars, Dominicans above all, had thundered relentlessly against Jewish moneylenders, urging Christians to found civic banks that lent money at less onerous rates. The situation for Italy’s Jews was growing steadily more difficult, and Luca Signorelli’s fresco, for all its striking imagery, marks a new spirit of hostility toward the Jews of Orvieto. Moïsé de Blanis did not live to see the worst of it; he was murdered in 1535. But his son, Laudadio, another doctor and rabbi, would see the establishment of ghettos in Rome, Florence and Venice and suffer banishment from Orvieto simply for his religion.”
The hyper realistic images of hell and paradise are even more distributing than the fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch. If there ever was an apotheosis of the Italian pagan Catholicism, the San Brizio Chapel in Orvieto is it.
Chapel of San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto
Luca Signorelli, The Damned (detail)
If you are in hell or paradise, rest assured, you can expect some healthy buttocks as a focal point of Luca Signorelli’s compositions…
Luca Signorelli, The Elect (detail)
Images published with permission from the Web Gallery of Art