A story is told by Vasari which brings Signorelli very close to our sympathy, and enables us to understand the fascination of pure form he felt so deeply.  “It is related of Luca that he had a son killed at Cortona, a youth of singular beauty in face and person, whom he had tenderly loved.  In his grief the father caused the boy to be stripped naked, and with extraordinary constancy of soul, uttering no complaint and shedding no tear, he painted the portrait of his dead son, to the end that he might still be able, through the work of his own hand, to contemplate that which nature had given him, but which an adverse fortune had taken away.”  So passionate and ardent, so convinced of the indissoluble bond between the soul he loved in life and its dead tenement of clay, and withal so iron-nerved and stout of will, it behoved that man to be, who undertook in the plenitude of his power, at the age of sixty, to paint upon the walls of the chapel of S. Brizio at Orvieto the images of Doomsday, Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell.[208]

It is a gloomy chapel in the Gothic cathedral of that forlorn Papal city—­gloomy by reason of bad lighting, but more so because of the terrible shapes with which Signorelli has filled it[209].  In no other work of the Italian Renaissance, except in the Sistine Chapel, has so much thought, engaged upon the most momentous subjects, been expressed with greater force by means more simple and with effect more overwhelming.  Architecture, landscape, and decorative accessories of every kind, the usual padding of quattrocento pictures, have been discarded from the main compositions.  The painter has relied solely upon his power of imagining and delineating the human form in every attitude, and under the most various conditions.  Darting like hawks or swallows through the air, huddling together to shun the outpoured vials of the wrath of God, writhing with demons on the floor of Hell, struggling into new life from the clinging clay, standing beneath the footstool of the Judge, floating with lute and viol on the winds of Paradise, kneeling in prayer, or clasping “inseparable hands with joy and bliss in overmeasure for ever”—­these multitudes of living beings, angelic, diabolic, bestial, human, crowd the huge spaces of the chapel walls.  What makes the impression of controlling doom the more appalling, is that we comprehend the drama in its several scenes, while the chief actor, the divine Judge, at whose bidding the cherubs sound their clarions, and the dead arise, and weal and woe are portioned to the saved and damned, is Himself unrepresented.[210] We breathe in the presence of embodied consciences, submitting, like our own, to an unseen inevitable will.