Except in his angels, Signorelli was comparatively indifferent to what is commonly considered beauty.  He was not careful to select his models, or to idealise their type.  The naked human body, apart from facial distinction or refinement of form, contented him.  Violent contrasts of light and shadow, accentuating the anatomical structure with rough and angular decision, give the effect of illustrative diagrams to his studies.  Harmony of proportion and the magic of expression are sacrificed to energy emergent in a powerful physique.  Redundant life, in sinewy limbs, in the proud carriage of the head upon the neck, in the sway of the trunk backward from the reins, the firmly planted calves and brawny thighs, the thick hair, broad shoulders, spare flanks, and massive gluteal muscles of a man of twenty-two or upwards, whose growth has been confined to the development of animal force, was what delighted him.  Yet there is no coarseness or animalism properly so called in his style.  He was attracted by the marvellous mechanism of the human frame—­its goodliness regarded as the most highly organised of animate existences.

Owing, perhaps, to this exclusive predilection for organic life, Signorelli was not great as a colourist.  His patches of blues and reds in the frescoes of Monte Oliveto are oppressively distinct; his use of dull brown for the shading of flesh imparts a disagreeable heaviness to his best modelled forms; nor did he often attain in his oil pictures to that grave harmony we admire in his “Last Supper” at Cortona.  The world of light and colour was to him a comparatively untravelled land.  It remained for other artists to raise these elements of pictorial expression to the height reached by Signorelli in his treatment of the nude.

Before quitting the frescoes at Orvieto, some attention should be paid to the medallions spoken of above, in special relation to the classicism of the earlier Renaissance.  Scenes from Dante’s “Purgatorio” and subjects from the “Metamorphoses” of Ovid are treated here in the same key; but the latter, since they engaged Signorelli’s fancy upon Greek mythology, are the more important for our purpose.  Two from the legend of “Orpheus” and two from that of “Proserpine” might be chosen as typical of the whole series.  Mediaeval intensity, curiously at variance with antique feeling, is discernible throughout.  The satellites of Hades are gaunt and sinewy devils, eager to do violence to Eurydice.  Pluto himself drives his jarring car-wheels up through the lava-blocks and flames of Etna with a fury and a vehemence we seek in vain upon antique sarcophagi.  Ceres, wandering through Sicily in search of her lost daughter, is a gaunt witch with dishevelled hair, raising frantic hands to tear her cheeks; while the snakes that draw her chariot are no grave symbols of the germinating corn, but greedy serpents ready to spit fire against the ravishers of Proserpine.  Thus the tranquillity and self-restraint