incarnating theology in the orvieto duomo

john skillen

part 1: introduction, and the façade of the duomo

I appreciate buildings with maximal harmony among their parts, and whose design inside and out is fitting for the purpose of the place. Renaissance architect Leon Battisti Alberti gives the strong version of such decorum in his On the Art of Building:

The parts [of a building] ought to be so composed that their overall harmony contributes to the honor and grace of the whole work, and that effort is not expended in adorning one part at the expense of all the rest, but that the harmony is such that the building appears a single, integral, and well-composed body, rather than a collection of extraneous and unrelated parts.

Alberti adds, “Even reliefs and panels, and any other decoration, must be so arranged that they appear to be in their natural and fitting place.” As Alberti states in his treatise On Painting, such harmony is manifested not only in architectural design but in visual narratives rich with themes that guide the community housed in the building. [1, bracketed numbers refer to the Endnotes]

The deservedly-admired cathedral in my second hometown of Orvieto (Italy) offers a notable example of such thematic coherence and harmony among its parts (well, among almost all its parts). No surviving document refers to an overarching plan for the decoration. The various zones of the Duomo were decorated in various time periods, in a variety of media and materials and in different styles. Neither “Romanesque” nor “Gothic,” the architecture itself resists labels. And yet Pope Pius II—a Renaissance humanist well-versed in principles of harmony—visiting Orvieto in 1460, described the Duomo as “the equal of any in Italy.” [2]

I enter the essay through the doors of the cathedral. The bronze-cast reliefs on the great central doors are the most recent artwork, commissioned to Emilio Greco in the 1960’s in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Non-traditional, not immediately readable, these doors have grown on the Orvietani, and me. They present the Works of Corporal Mercy enumerated in Jesus’s discourse on the End Times in Matthew 25 as criteria by which God distinguishes the sheep from the goats: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, providing shelter for the homeless, caring for the sick, visiting those in prison, and added to those six, burying the dead.

I have been present at Mass when a beloved bishop of Orvieto described the panels as marking the great portal not so much as the Entrance into the Duomo but as our Exit. Gesturing first to the Chapel of the Holy Corporal, where the decoration is keyed to the presence of Christ in the sacrament, and then to Greco’s great doors, the Bishop exhorted the congregation that to receive in good faith the body of Christ in the sacrament should drive us out into the world as the body of Christ now to serve those in need, and, further (gesturing to the San Brizio Chapel), that how we have tended to that work will be an element of Christ’s Judgment when he returns to usher in His new Creation.

The Bishop’s comments testify to the thesis developed in this essay. It was natural for him to draw out how works of art in the various zones of the Duomo work together to inform, remind, and inspire our life as the Body of Christ.

Construction of the Duomo began in 1290 under Pope Nicholas IV, the second pope in thirty years to establish long-term residence in Orvieto. The decision to build the cathedral is generally assumed (without clear contemporary documentation) to have been associated in some way with the establishment of the high holy-day of Corpus Christi by Pope Urban IV from his seat in Orvieto twenty-five years earlier in 1264 with the papal Bull Transiturus de Hoc Mundo.

A key passage in Transiturus explains:

In this sacramental commemoration, Jesus Christ is present with us in his proper substance, although under another form. As he was about to ascend into heaven, he said to the Apostles and their helpers, I will be with you all days even unto the consummation of the world … with a gracious promise that he would remain and would be with them even by his corporeal presence. Therefore he gave himself as nourishment, so that, since man fell by means of the food of the death-giving tree; man is raised up by means of the food of the life-giving tree. … Thus the Saviour says, My Flesh is real food. This bread is taken but truly not consumed, because it is not transformed into the eater. [3]

“Although this memorial Sacrament is frequented in the daily solemnities of the Mass,” proclaims the Pope, “we nevertheless think suitable and worthy that, at least once a year … a more solemn and honorable memory of this Sacrament be held.”

Urban then adds: “Moreover we know that, while we [that is, I the Pope] were constituted in a lesser office, it was divinely revealed to certain Catholics that a feast of this kind should be celebrated generally throughout the Church.” The comment assuredly refers to a movement initiated as early as the 1220’s by a remarkable woman in the town of Liège (now in Belgium). Juliana of Mont Cornillon, obedient to a recurring vision, eventually gained support from the Dominican theologian Hugh of St. Cher and the Archdeacon of the cathedral in Liège, Jacques Pantaléon. [4]

The tireless efforts of these three from the 1230’s to the ‘50’s to establish the feast-day throughout the Church were only partially successful. The holy-day was given larger scope and authority only when the Archdeacon himself became Pope in 1261: none other than Urban IV, with Hugh of St. Cher a cardinal at his side in Orvieto. [5]

To move back one more step in time, there is little doubt that the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 provided the larger context of this appeal for a church-wide celebration of the mystery of the Sacrament. The very first of its “constitutions” addresses matters of “Confession of Faith,” including the history-making use of the verb “to transubstantiate” to describe the nature of Christ’s real presence in the sacrament.

Here is indeed one universal church of the faithful, outside of which nobody at all is saved, in which Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrifice. His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance [transubstantiated, in Latin], by God’s power, into his body and blood, so that in order to achieve this mystery of unity we receive from God what he received from us. [6]

The new wording was not without controversy, and prompted a Europe-wide reflection on how we are to understand the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament. These brief comments sketch the doctrinal and historical context for the existence of a cathedral whose decoration (as I will conclude) provides an extensive visual theology of the doctrine of the Incarnation.

The basic structure of the cathedral was completed by the 1320’s. Decoration began immediately with the façade. Then followed the left transept (newly constructed in the 1350’s, decorated 1357-1364), then the tribune or apsidal area surrounding the altar (1370-1384), finally, but not until 130 years later, the right transept. I will take them up in the order of their making.

THE FAÇADE, ESPECIALLY THE PANELS CARVED IN RELIEF

The Duomo was dedicated to Mary, especially in the aspect of her Assumption. Hence the Virgin figures prominently in the decoration of the façade, mainly through a programme of mosaics on the upper half. Although an original plan for the mosaics surely existed, they have a complex history over several centuries of repair and replacement, of drawings commissioned from several artists for subjects that appear to have changed. Hence, as stunningly beautiful as the mosaics are, efforts to determine either clear intention or common public experience face a moving target.

Framing the three doors along the entire width of the façade at ground level are four wide marble pilasters richly carved in low relief. Together the panels narrate salvation history from Creation to Last Judgment. The left-most pilaster presents scenes of the Creation and Fall, followed by the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, Cain’s murder of Abel, and first labors of our first parents.[7] God shapes the figure of Adam from the earth with the tool of the clay sculptor. Their identical faces neatly visualize Adam as “made in the image” of God. God pulls Eve out of Adam’s side in a graphic bit of surgery.

The next panel, on the immediate left of the central portal, presents sixteen scenes from Old Testament prophecy woven together in a traditional Tree of Jesse image. Scholarly debate (and blind-eyed confusion among townsfolk and tourists) continues about which scriptural passages of Messianic prophecy are represented. A general consensus exists about the identity of six of the scenes: the Anointing of David, Gideon and his Fleece, Balaam and the Ass, Balaam’s Vision of the Star, Ezekiel’s Vision of the Tetramorph, and the Prophetic or Symbolic Crucifixion.

All operate in the long tradition in commentary and exegesis of typological interpretation of the Old Testament, whereby events in their historical dimension at the same time point ahead figurally as types and foreshadowings of episodes in the Life of Christ.

In a careful study of the panel, art historian Susanna Caroselli cites popular sources such as the Biblia pauperum (Bibles of the Poor) and the Speculum humanae salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation) to show that such typological connections were not just the stuff of the theologians. The narrative of Gideon and the Fleece, for example, is often used as a type of the Annunciation; untouched by the morning dew, the fleece is like the virginity of the Mary at the conception of Christ. Balaam’s prophecy of the Star out of Jacob (Numbers 24:17) anticipates the star followed by the Magi, and so forth.[8]

The sixteen scenes on the third panel (to the right side of the central door) are readily identifiable episodes from the life of Christ, but with a clear bias to the selection. Over half are given to his birth and boyhood: the Annunciation and Visitation; Nativity and Adoration of the Magi; Presentation in the Temple and Flight into Egypt; Massacre of the Innocents and Teaching in the Temple at age twelve, concluding with Jesus’s Baptism and Temptation that mark the beginning of his ministry. But then the sequence jumps—with nary a single scene from his years of teaching and preaching and miracle-working—to six scenes from Holy Week: the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, his Betrayal in the garden, the Flagellation, the Crucifixion, the Angel appearing to the Women at the Empty Tomb, concluding with the scene of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus, whose “Do not touch me” underlines His glorified flesh. The proportion highlights the bodily life of Christ, born, crucified, resurrected; that is, the Incarnation. The emphasis is on a Word embodied in human flesh, not one who reveals the Father by word alone.

And finally, the rightmost pilaster is a multi-scene narration of the Last Judgment: the general resurrection of the dead from their tombs, the Saved ascending towards Christ enthroned in majesty at the top of the panel, those who rejected Christ herded by demons downwards to the place of wailing and gnashing of teeth. No disembodied souls but resurrected, or damned, bodies.

Placed in the arch immediately above the main portal, framed by the four storiated pilasters, is a marble statue of the Virgin Mary, the child Jesus on her lap, revealed yet enclosed in a bronze-cast tent whose curtains are pulled back by three angels on either side—evoking the curtains of the holy of holies opened to reveal the tabernacle. The Virgin is highlighted as the vessel of the Incarnation, in whose womb the Godhead clothed himself in human flesh and “dwelt among us” (as the King James Version translates the phrase that means “pitched his tent” or “tabernacled” among us).

One can say fairly that the entire programme of the façade reminds those beholding and entering the Duomo that God did and does his work of Creation and Redemption by creating his image-bearers as bodies, by “taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness … being found in appearance as a man, humbling himself by becoming obedient to death” (Philippians 2:6-8), enacting the New Covenant through his own body and blood, and who raises resurrected bodies, not disembodied souls into his eternal kingdom.

part 2: the chapel of the holy corporal

The chapel marking the left transept was added to the nave of the Duomo in the 1350’s, a generation after the main block was completed. Here the story becomes complicated.

By the 1330’s, the local celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi had taken on an additional association with a eucharistic miracle that was said to have occurred in 1263 in the nearby town of Bolsena. That is to say, the association emerged over a half-century after the supposed event, even though no mention of the miracle is made in the bull Transiturus, nor in the records concerning the foundation of the cathedral, nor in the liturgy for Corpus Christi in any of the earliest three versions. [9]

The earliest existing telling of the Orvietan version of the miracle occurs almost in tandem in two very different media—an extravagant reliquary and a popular sacred drama—with the same basic plot and episodes, summarized here:

In 1263 a priest was making a penitential pilgrimage to Rome to reconcile his conscience with the new formulation of the doctrine of the transubstantiated presence of Christ in the elements of Holy Communion. Following the standard pilgrimage route from northern Europe to Rome, he stopped at the hostel-church of Santa Cristina in the lakeside town of Bolsena, only a few miles from Orvieto. While celebrating Mass, at the elevation of the host, drops of blood miraculously dripped from the host onto the “corporal” (the small tablecloth placed on the altar under the chalice and paten). Pope Urban IV, in residence in Orvieto, called for the corporal to be brought for inspection and adoration to Orvieto, meeting it ceremonially in the valley below the city. Inspired by the miracle, the Pope instituted the new holy-day of Corpus Christi, and turned to Thomas Aquinas to prepare the liturgy, promptly accomplished. [10]

A silver reliquary was crafted in 1337-1338 for the protection and display of the cloth, with small enameled panels depicting the narrative. The drama about the miracle mass in Bolsena was performed in Orvieto regularly enough in the 14th century to be included in a collection of such local sacre rappresentazioni compiled by a certain Tramo di Lonardo in 1405. The play dramatizes the visiting priest’s troubled conscience, and concludes with Thomas Aquinas’s delivery to the Pope of the new liturgy. [11]

How Corpus Christi became tightly connected with the miraculous bleeding host may remain a puzzle for the scholars [12], but there is no gainsaying that the close relation between the holy-day, the Duomo, and the miracle has become cemented in the consciousness of all Orvietani since—with the arts, both visual and dramatic, playing a strong role.

The chapel indeed appears to have been planned from the beginning to be the reliquary chapel of the blood-stained altar cloth. Immediately upon its completion, local painter Ugolino di Prete Ilario was commissioned to fresco the chapel; the campaign lasted from 1357 to 1364. On the right wall are scenes of the eucharistic miracle at Bolsena in parallel with the narrative on the reliquary and in the play. The opposite wall is dense with depictions of other so-called eucharistic miracles. The ceiling, however, presents scriptural scenes and other theological references which recent scholars have confirmed are coordinated with passages from the actual liturgy for the feast of Corpus Christi.

Nevertheless, however tendential may be the story that the eucharistic miracle prompted the institution of Corpus Christi, no research has discredited the pictorialized and dramatized account that Thomas Aquinas prepared the liturgy. Aquinas was verifiably resident for several years in the 1260’s at the Dominican monastery in Orvieto, already known for its school of theology. Careful scholarship has confirmed the consonance of the liturgy with Aquinas’s writings about the Sacrament. [13]

Dominique Surh is the first modern scholar to recover attention to what contemporary congregants would have been sufficiently equipped to notice, namely, the society-wide habit of seeking parallels between Old Testament episodes and those concerning Christ (evident in the façade). [14]

The scenes painted in the four triangular sections of vaulting directly above the altar depict four Old Testament “meals” long interpreted in Catholic tradition as types or prefigurations of the Eucharistic feast. Each is referred to in the liturgy for the Feast of Corpus Christi.

In the triangle directly above the altar, Abraham receives the offering of wheat and wine from Melchisedek (Genesis 14:18-20), whose reference in Psalm 110:4 (“a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek”) was applied to Christ, elaborated in the epistle to the Hebrews (7:4-10). Surh points out the threefold typological reference: “a figure of Christ, of the oblation of Christ, and of the Eucharist. In the liturgy, the very first antiphon is “Christ the lord, a priest forever in the order of Melchisedek, offered bread and wine” (Walters 240).

The adjacent scene in the vaulting depicts three moments of the hospitality given by Abraham to the three angels under the Oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18). Captioned beneath his greeting is: “tres vidit et unum adoravit” (he saw three and adored one), identifying the event as a prefiguration of the Trinity. The second mini-episode shows Abraham washing the angels’ feet; the third shows Abraham offering bread and wine to the angels. The scenes foreshadow Christ’s foot-washing and offering of bread and wine at the Last Supper. The narrative as a whole was long understood to refer typologically to the Annunciation, since the mission of the angels was to announce that Sarah would bear a child.

These typological connections continue in the other two episodes in the vault above the altar. One scene, God’s provision of manna during the Exodus, was of course was applied typologically by Jesus himself, the Bread of eternal life, in John 6:31-32: “Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat. Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.” An oft-cited text from the Book of Wisdom underscored the relation: “Thou didst send them bread from heaven, containing in itself every sweetness and delight” (16:20). This text is used in Aquinas’s liturgy as a brief response at the end of two hymns and as an antiphon (Walters 261).

The fourth scene depicts God’s provision of food for Elijah delivered by ravens as the prophet waited in the desert for God to act, strengthened by the food before walking all the way to the mountain of God (1 Kings 17). The passage was long applied to the eucharist as foretaste and promise of God’s return, and as provision—a viaticum—for our journey to heaven. (This is an example of anagogical interpretation, the dimension of typology that refers us to the final fulfillment of God’s redemptive action.) In the liturgy for Corpus Christi, reference to Elijah in the desert occurs in the response to one of the readings in the liturgy (Walters 264).

Surh’s case, in sum, is that the painted scenes parallel the assigned readings in the Liturgy for Corpus Christi, and that “by using the office as the principal source for developing the iconography [of the vaulting], the theologians of the programme brought a visual counterpart of the Divine Office into the space of the Eucharist’s daily celebration.”

Here things become messier. From the perspective of the pictorial program in the ceiling, grounded as it is in scripture and authoritative traditions of interpretation, the eucharistic miracles frescoed on the walls below draw us into an altogether different universe of references. There, more immediately available at eye-level to those gathered for Mass, the local miracle of the bleeding host is the main attraction, but a variety of other such miracles are given briefer visual treatment on the left wall. In one, a Jewish boy who receives holy communion is then thrown into the oven by his father, only to be found unharmed by his mother. Another takes up a story of a mass performed by St. Gregory in which a woman in attendance who doubted the true presence of Christ in the sacrament beheld, at the words of consecration, the elements being transformed into flesh and blood in the form of a disembodied bleeding finger.

 In fact, a highly respected Catholic historian of the liturgy, Gary Macy, has demonstrated that the folklorish eucharistic miracles such as those depicted in the Duomo are simply incompatible with the theology of the sacrament as articulated by Aquinas and other authoritative theologians of the thirteenth century, including Hugh of St. Cher, co-initiator of the holy-day and resident in Orvieto with Urban’s curia at the supposed time of the miracle mass. [15]

The Dominican theologian Roland of Cremona, for example, “offered a fairly sweeping dismissal, not only of a particular instance of such a miracle, but that such miracles were even appropriate.” Citing Aquinas’s discussion of miracle hosts in the final part of the Summa theologia, Macy notes St. Thomas’s skepticism about miracle hosts: the beholders’ “eyes are so affected as if they outwardly saw flesh, or blood, or a child, while no change takes place in the sacrament.”

“According to the vast majority of theologians in the twelfth through early fourteenth century,” states Macy, “the point of the Eucharist was not the real presence”:

The risen Lord was only present in the Eucharist in order to lead the recipient of that presence into the life of faith and active love required by membership in the Church, the mystical Body of Christ. The real presence alone could not save; in fact, if a person received the presence while not living a life of faith and love, the presence itself was damning, not saving. The emphasis which theologians placed on a life of faith and love as the purpose of the Eucharist is clearest in their discussions of reception. [16]

In the popular consciousness the melodramatic narratives depicted on the walls (and underscored by the drama of the play) have largely overpowered the more authoritative visual theology consonant with the liturgy itself. This is the moment of discord mentioned in my introduction. Yet, the incompatibility of walls to ceiling does not undercut the general thesis, namely, that the decoration throughout the Duomo presents a consistent attention to the one great matter of the Incarnation. Then, as now, how we put into words and concepts and images Christ’s real presence in the sacrament was disputed ground.

Part 3: Scenes from the Life of Mary and the Holy Family in the Apse

In 1370, with the frescoes completed in the left transept, the Opera del Duomo again turned to Ugolino di Prete Ilario to fresco the area surrounding the altar (the apse, or tribune) with scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary. [17]

Ugolino and his workshop worked from 1370 to 1384 on what remains the largest cycle of Marian scenes in western Europe, both in square footage and in number of scenes (more than 30 captioned panels). The narrative culminates in the highest area of the East wall with five scenes: the Angel announcing to the aged Mary her coming death; her death (the Dormition); the disciples processing the dead Mary to her sepulcher; Jesus raising Mary from her tomb; and, in the high arch above the central window, her Assumption into heaven witnessed by the disciples. Directly above the Assumption in the triangular space of the ceiling vaulting Mary receives her crown from her Son. [18]

Arranged in a left-to-right U-pattern on two registers circling the lower and larger area of the tribune are scenes from the life of the Virgin. Included are the beloved episodes from the apocryphal accounts of the young Mary featured in most of the Marian cycles: her miraculous birth to her aged parents Anna and Joachim, Mary’s entrance into the Temple as a young girl and her marriage to Joseph. The Annunciation and the Visitation, the Nativity and the Adoration of the Shepherds and of the Magi, the Presentation of baby Jesus in the Temple, and the Flight into Egypt all find their place in the Ugolino’s cycle.

But Ugolino’s narration of Mary’s life gives unusual attention not just to the sanctity of the Virgin herself but, as Sara Nair James writes, to “intimate glimpses” of the holy family’s daily life, of the “tenderness of human interactions” in which Jesus’s adoptive earthly father Joseph figures prominently.

Joseph is often placed center-stage by Ugolino. For example, the Nativity scene focuses simply on Joseph and Mary kneeling before the newborn babe lying on the ground between them, but Joseph is the figure at the center of the visual field. In the scene of the Adoration of the Magi, Joseph is placed at the apex of the pyramidal arrangement of the four men, his own hands raised in amazed adoration. In the Presentation in the Temple, Simeon holds the baby Jesus in front of the altar, while Joseph interacts with the priest behind the altar, in the background but at the center. Joseph again occupies a central position in the Circumcision, turning to Mary with a look of fatherly concern.

The sequence of four scenes on the lower register of the right wall begins with the Annunciation. But Joseph holds an important place in the other three episodes. In the Visitation the two husbands Joseph and Zacharias visually frame the embrace of Mary and Elizabeth in the center (although the men’s presence is not in the scriptural account). The last episode in this sequence depicts Joseph welcoming Mary into his house. Mary enters the scene on the left, but Joseph is the central figure, with some musicians on the right supplying festive accompaniment – no shame or embarrassment here. [19] In a scene depicting the Holy Family at home, Joseph as blacksmith works outside at his anvil, while Mary seems to be homeschooling young Jesus inside!

Most surprising is Ugolino’s treatment of the story of Jesus at the age of twelve, having accompanied his parents to the Passover Festival in Jerusalem, but staying behind asking astute questions of the Teachers in the temple courts. The story is typically compressed into a single scene with Jesus seated in the center and the Jewish elders symmetrically-arranged on either side (as in the version carved on the façade of the Duomo). Here, the story becomes an intimate family drama expanded to five scenes and filling the entire upper register on south wall (the same proportion as given to Mary’s own birth narrative). Joseph figures prominently in every scene. The first panel depicts the family on their journey to Jerusalem. In the next they stand before the temple (its architecture rather like that of the Duomo), Joseph kneeling at the boy’s side apparently giving the boy a lesson. In the middle scene, Joseph and Mary discover that Jesus is missing. A dramatic empty space opens between the two parents, their hands clasped to chests. The fourth scene depicts Jesus among the Elders, the teachers responding variously. The boy’s position on the right side creates a visual juxtaposition with his position on the left in the final scene. There, the boy who has just been speaking authoritatively to his elders is reunited submissively to his parents—as the caption below the scene underlines: “Where Jesus dismisses the doctors; He comes to the Virgin Mary [and] Joseph [and] ardently submits to them.”

To be sure, the saintly Virgin is highlighted in the culminating central height of the long cycle. But the visual experience of the viewer working her way through the larger portion of the cycle is of a family affair—of a fully engaged earthly father along with a devoted mother, working in concert to raise their boy in godliness. We may perceive the lesson that, even for Jesus, learning obedience to his heavenly father began with training in obedience to his earthly father. As for Mary, the cycle presents her as the vessel of God’s humanity in Jesus, not just in the womb but in his upbringing. We are made in God’s image; but through the Incarnation He becomes as fully human even as we are. [20]

part 4: the chapel of san brizio: the end times and last judgment

The right transept was constructed during the period 1408-1444, almost a century after the Chapel of the Holy Corporal. The space is similarly defined as a single chapel (typically referred to now as the San Brizio Chapel, after the painting of the Madonna of San Brizio on the altar).

The commission to decorate the chapel was first given to the noted artist-theologian from the Dominican monastery of San Marco in Florence, now known as Fra Angelico. But after only a single summer of work in 1447, Fra Angelico was called to Rome for a papal commission. Fifty years passed before the committee-in-charge signed a contract with another respected painter, Luca Signorelli, to complete Fra Angelico’s programme. [21]

The two triangular sections in the vaulting of the ceiling completed by Fra Angelico (Christ in Majesty and a group of prophets captioned as Prophetarum laudabilis numerus) are sufficient to identify the theme as a Last Judgment. Twenty years earlier, Fra Angelico had painted a Last Judgment (commissioned for use as the back of an abbot’s bench) adding authority to what became the usual arrangement of the scene: Christ descending to Judge with equity, with the “praiseworthy number of the prophets” to his left, the “glorious chorus of the apostles” on his right, the empty tombs in the earth below him of those now raised in the general resurrection of the dead, the damned to the viewer’s right being dragged by demons into the appropriate zones of hell, and angels to the viewer’s left ushering the saved into the paradise prepared for them.

Whether or not Signorelli was following a disegno already sketched by Fra Angelico, we can speak of the Last Judgment in the San Brizio Chapel as a stupendous expansion of the bench-back template into a three-dimensional scene filling the entire altar half of the chapel.

One problem was the window centered on the altar wall that precluded placing the Resurrection of the Dead directly under Christ. But the scene is relocated as the conclusion of the series of events that signal the End Times (following Jesus’s discourses in the gospels) presented sequentially in a U-pattern around the rear half of the chapel. The End Times begin with the Preaching of the Antichrist. The signs of the impending apocalypse arch over the entrance wall; then “the trumpets shall sound and the dead shall be raised.”

Depicted almost (as we might say) in time-lapse sequence, the Resurrection of the Dead is keyed to the prophet Ezekiel’s vision (chapter 37) of the valley of the dry bones: “This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life … Then you will know that I am the Lord’.” Skeletons push their way up out of the earth, taking on sinews and flesh, then standing upright as glorious and profoundly-physical nude bodies, some gathering in groups, male and female in a communion beyond the attitudes of human sexuality.

Signorelli’s depiction of unclothed and anatomically-studied human bodies was notable at its time—Michelangelo came from Rome to learn from this precedent. But nothing theologically-suspect is implied by Signorelli’s visual interpretation. It takes its place in a long conversation about the nature of our perfected and resurrected bodies (age, distinguishing features, if and how our gendering as male and female will be manifest, etc.). [22]

A clue to the theological context is found in the phrase in Signorelli’s contract that obliges him to consult closely with the “masters of the sacred page,” referring almost certainly to the scholars from the nearby school of theology in the Dominican monastery where Aquinas had taught. The Dominican attention to the body goes back to the initial mission of St. Dominic to refute Catharism, and to secure the faithful in their resistance to gnostic heterodoxy. For the Cathars, a God who descends to human flesh was anathema, as was the notion that a human being could be the perfect image of the Father, or that the telos of sanctification could be a redeemed body. In short, Catharism was the antagonist of any thorough-going theology of the Incarnation. [23]

For the Orvietani of the epoch, the threat of the Catharist heresy was no mere matter of scholastic debate; the two local saints murdered by Cathars, Pietro Parenzo and Faustino, were memorialized in a small recessed chapel along the wall of the San Brizio Chapel.

Dominican influence is visually present in the number of Dominican figures in the frescoes. In the ceiling vault directly above the large scene of the deceptive preaching of the Antichrist are the “order of the wise doctors” (doctorum sapiens ordo). Looking over the shoulders of the four Doctors of the Western church in the front row is Thomas Aquinas himself, hand raised to interject something into the conversation between Saints Augustine and Gregory about the heresy unfolding below them. There, wandering through the confused crowd gathered around the Antichrist is a sinister-looking figure handing out bribes from his money pouch. A false miracle performed by the Antichrist, resurrecting a dead body, occurs in the background; other figures are tortured and beheaded. Right in the middle of the confusion is a huddle of Dominican friars, the Scripture opened in their hands, as though planning their defense, or matching the scenes around them with Jesus’s enumeration of the warning signs of the End.

These illustrations of the deceptions of the Antichrist are taken directly from the Dominican Jacobus da Voragine’s commentary for the First Sunday of Advent in the Golden Legend, his widely reproduced compendium of material organized around the Church Year (a sort of preacher’s manual, full of sermon ideas):

… to precede the Last Judgment will be the false pretensions of the Antichrist. He will try to deceive all men in four ways, first by cunning argument or false explanation of the Scriptures. … He will also try to deceive by working miracles. … A third means of deception will be his conferring of gifts. … His fourth method will be the infliction of torments. [24]

In fact, the entire chapel is keyed to the pivot of the church year: from the feasts of Christ the King and of All Saints that conclude the liturgical calendar, to beginning the cycle again with the First Sunday of Advent. While many of us approach Advent as preparation for our Lord’s first coming as a helpless babe, the focus of the scriptural lessons for Advent is on preparing ourselves for His Second Coming in power and judgment. With its focus on the culmination of salvation history, the decoration of the San Brizio Chapel provides a fitting anagogical summing up of the theology of the Incarnation. [25]

In conclusion, the guiding theme of the entire Duomo is that God’s modus operandi has been to invest Himself from beginning to end in the human flesh he formed “in his image.” He clothed himself in the body in Mary’s womb. His perfect image is embodied in Christ. The bread and wine of the Last Supper is Christ’s “body and blood,” a meal that He will not take again “until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God” (Luke 22:16; Matthew 26:29). The church is the Body of Christ now, known through his followers’ investment in those in need. He inaugurates his Eternal Kingdom with the re-creation of a new spiritual flesh. His Real Presence in the Eucharist (however described theologically or scientifically) provides us with a viaticum, a foretaste of the banquet of the Lamb, enjoyed not through a gnostic escape from the flesh, but as the perfected bodies intended from the beginning. Each of these aspects of God Incarnate is given visual form in the Duomo.

The Orvieto Duomo provides a powerful example of decoration woven together into a coherent whole, even while each element operates independently. In Albertian terms, an (almost perfect) historia from the first Creation to the Second Re-Creation unfolds through the entirety of a single expansive space.

Endnotes

[1] Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, Robert Tavernor eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 23-24. For Alberti’s discussion of historia see On Painting (New York: Penguin Classics reprinted edition, 1991), 88-89; Book 3, section 53.

[2] Secret Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope: The Commentaries of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini Pius II (Folio Society, 1988). Visiting Orvieto to resolve endemic feuding between Monaldeschi and Filippeschi clans, the Pope observes: “Age has destroyed much and civil strife has burned and ravaged more. Half-ruined towers and crumbling churches can still be seen, but [the Duomo] the equal of any in Italy, stands intact at the city centre.” Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s re-building of his hometown of Pienza is featured in every architectural history book.

[3] The Bull can be found variously, both in Latin and several English translations, on the internet; I cite the version available from The American Catholic, at https://www.the-american-catholic.com/2015/06/07/transiturus-de-hoc-mundo/ The Latin: https://w2.vatican.va/content/urbanus-iv/la/documents/bulla-transiturus-de-mundo-11-aug-1264.html

[4] The Feast of Corpus Christi, Barbara R. Walters, Vincent Corrigan, Peter T. Ricketts, eds. (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), especially pp. 5-35 for an excellent orientation to the history of the Feast-day and the liturgies prepared for it. Hereafter cited in the text as “Walters.”

[5] Even Urban’s efforts were not entirely successful in spreading the Feast-day throughout Christendom. Not until 1312 did Corpus Christi receive strong endorsement from Pope Clement V, stalled by his premature death, until Pope John XXII formally instituted the feast of Corpus Christi for the entire Church. The conclusions of the painstaking research of the group of scholars that worked on The Feast of Corpus Christi book are that the three theologically-compatible but different manuscripts of the Liturgy can be associated with three stages of the holy-day’s development (see pp. 63-65, 78-79 for a summary). The manuscript held in the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague can credibly be associated with the early stage from Liège, with a strong hand of Hugh of St. Cher. The manuscript held in the Abbey of Strahov in Prague probably represents the work undertaken during the time of the Bull Transiturus; and the manuscript in the National Library of France represents the mature liturgy associated with the definitive endorsement of the feast-day in the 13-teens, encompassing the work of Thomas Aquinas.

[6] The documents of the Fourth Lateran Council are readily accessible on the website of Papal Encyclicals On-line: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum12-2.htm#1 Among the purposes of the 4th Lateran Council were: “ … to correct faults and to reform morals, to remove heresies and to strengthen faith, to settle discords and to establish peace …”

[7] At the top of the panel are two scenes, not so much narrative as thematic, of the origins of fruitful human enterprise: specifically, grammar, music, geometry (not strange, since they are three of the seven liberal arts of the classical curriculum). Although commentators labor to interpret these scenes exactly, they suggest that our first parents’ descendants remain as image bearers still operating with their Maker’s DNA (as we say nowadays).

[8] Michael D. Taylor’s unpublished Ph.D. dissertation The iconography of the facade decoration of the Cathedral of Orvieto (Princeton University, 1970) remains the most comprehensive study of the façade panels. Susanna Caroselli’s essay was delivered at the conference “Eucharist and Eschatology: Art and Theology in the Orvieto Duomo,” organized by John Skillen and Timothy Verdon in Orvieto in June 2004. Caroselli’s careful examination of medieval commentary and iconography “yields the following results: of the sixteen prophetic texts, six may be linked through exegesis or typology with the Incarnation, while all sixteen are recognized in some accessible earlier medieval source as prophetic of the second coming of Christ.” In highlighting their anagogical dimension (a foreshadowing of the final End of salvation history), Caroselli shows how this collection of figural Old Testament episodes resonates not only with the scenes from the life of Christ on the next panel, but with the Christ’s final return in Judgment depicted on the fourth pilaster (and with the Last Judgment in the Chapel of San Brizio inside the Duomo).

NOTES TO PART 2: THE CHAPEL OF THE HOLY CORPORAL

[9] Reference to the bull, but not the miracle, is found in the liturgy itself in one of the Readings (Walters 263): “Hence, so that the faithful may solemnly honor again the institution of such a great sacrament by a complete office of celebration, the Roman Pope Urban IV, influenced by the devotion of this sacrament, piously decreed commemoration of the aforementioned institution on feria five after the octave of Pentecost [that is, on the second Thursday after Pentecost], to be celebrated by all the faithful …”

[10] The relation of the Miracle to the feast-day and to the construction of the Duomo is repeated as fact in every guidebook and narrated by every townsperson to visitors. I was asked by the authors of one of the key guidebooks to the Duomo to translate their Italian into English; here’s my translation of a passage from Mirabilia:

“It was in 1263 that a certain Peter of Prague, a priest from Bohemia uncertain about the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, set out on pilgrimage to Rome. He stopped in Bolsena. While celebrating mass in the church of Santa Christina, he saw blood dripping from the consecrated host, staining the altar cloth and the stones of the altar. By order of Pope Urban IV, then residing in nearby Orvieto, the relic was carried immediately to the city on the cliff. Only one year later, with the bull Transiturus, the pope instituted for the entire Catholic Church the solemn feast-day of Corpus Domini. From that small linen cloth, bearing the traces of the miracle, came the inspiration to construct in Orvieto itself a cathedral to preserve, like a grand and enormous reliquary, the marvelous divine sign and to hand it down intact through the generations. On the 13th of November, 1290, Pope Nicholas IV laid the corner-stone of the most important spiritual, cultural and economic enterprise ever undertaken by the city.”

[11] Laudario Orvietano, Gina Scentoni, ed. (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi Sull’Alto Medioevo, 1994), as play number XXV, 364-379. The play has periodically been revived, several times in the 1950’s, most recently in 2007.

[12] Lucio Riccetti’s paper, delivered at the “Eucharist and Eschatology: Art and Theology in the Orvieto Duomo” conference, not yet translated into English, provides painstaking research about who and why and when the miracle was retroactively emphasized as the incentive for establishing the holy-day and building the Duomo. The essay was published as “Dal Concilio al Miracolo: Mistero Eucharistico, concilio Lateranense IV, Miracolo del Corporale,” Vivens homo 18 (2007), 171–219, and in the conference proceedings, Spazi e immagini dell’eucaristia: il caso di Orvieto, Gianni Cioli, Severino Dianich, and Valerio Mauro, eds. (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane Bologna, 2007), 171-227. The biggest of the annual events in the Orvieto is still the procession of the stained Corporal on Corpus Christi Sunday through the streets of the town, involving hundreds of participants in medieval costume.

[13] Walters and the other contributers to The Feast of Corpus Christi book underline the importance of the research of Pierre-Marie Gy and of Ronald Zawilla in his Ph.D. dissertation, The Biblical Sources of the Historia Corporis Christi Attributed to Thomas Aquinas: A Theological Study to Determine Their Authority (University of Toronto, 1985). For this liturgy, St. Thomas composed several hymns that have remained beloved in church tradition (found in the Episcopal hymnbook, among other places), including “Now my tongue the mystery telling of the glorious Body sing …” (Pange Lingua) and “Humbly I adore thee, Verity unseen, who thy glory hidest ‘neath these shadows mean” (Adoro devote).

[14] Dominique Suhr, Corpus Christi and the Cappella del Corporale at Orvieto (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2000). I cite the paper, based on the dissertation, delivered at the conference “Eucharist and Eschatology: Art and Theology in the Orvieto Duomo.” Very helpful is Kristen Van Ausdall’s essay “Art and Eucharist in the Late Middle Ages,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, Ian Christopher Levy, Gary Macy and Kristen Van Ausdall, eds. (Boston: Brill, 2012), 541-617, especially the section on “The Miraculous Mass of Bolsena and the Chapel of the Corporal in Orvieto” (582-596). An introductory account of the hermeneutic of typology can be found in John E. Skillen, Putting Art (back) in its Place (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2016), 193-200, with references to the major works of scholarship on the fourfold senses of Scripture, including Henri de Lubac’s authoritative Medieval Exegesis, Volume 2 The Four Senses of Scripture, translated by Mark Sebanc and E. M. Macierowski (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000).

[15] Gary Macy’s paper comparing the theology of the Eucharist as developed by the authoritative figures of the thirteenth century with the theology implicit in popular lay devotion was also presented at the conference “Eucharist and Eschatology in the Orvieto Duomo” in 2004. Macy’s essay, titled “Medieval Theology of the Eucharist and the Chapel of the Miracle Corporal” was published in Spazi e immagini dell’eucaristia: il caso di Orvieto, edited by Gianni Cioli, Severino Dianich, and Valerio Mauro Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane Bologna, 2007), 59-77; as well as in Vivens homo, 18 (2007), 59–77. Broader context is given by Macy’s essay “Theology of the Eucharist in the High Middle Ages” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, 365-398.

[16] Of direct relevance to the concerns about the Cathar heresy that percolates through the decoration of the Duomo is Macy’s comment about Alexander of Hales and William of Auvergne who “stated in their works that they wished to avoid the extremes of two heresies. One of these was, of course, the denial of the real presence associated with the Cathars. For the first time, however, they also mentioned a second heresy to beware; the teaching that the body of the risen Lord was corporally present in the sacrament. Their concern was that some people believed that Christ was truly eaten and broken in his physical earthly body.” As Macy concludes his careful study of the relevant texts:

“In so far as that theology [implied by the wall frescoes] insisted on the real presence of the risen Christ in the Eucharist, they [the authoritative theologians] would have enthusiastically approved. In so far as the frescoes suggest that the same risen Christ was corporally present in any miracle host or other Eucharistic miracle, they would have sternly disapproved. In so far as the frescoes emphasize the real presence as more important than the purpose of the real presence, that is, the spiritual reception of Christ embodied in a life of faith and love, they would have thoroughly disapproved and have been greatly saddened at what they could only perceive as a serious theological error.”

NOTES TO PART 3: SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF MARY IN THE APSE

[17] My discussion here is everywhere indebted to the article—the first extended scholarly discussion of the cycle—by Sara Nair James (art historian at Mary Baldwin College) in Gesta (Spring 2016, v. 55, n.1, 79-104). Although the frescoes form the backdrop for every Mass—and for regular concerts and special events—they are the least attended to by townsfolk, tourists, and scholars alike; Ugolino gained no fame beyond his hometown.

[18] A similar programme of scenes is repeated in a different medium in the stained-glass windows on the east wall of the tribune, an element that I have not addressed in this essay in part because they so small in scale as to be indecipherable to the congregation, and are absent from local experience and discussion.

[19] Joseph’s high profile in the Duomo cycle is not entirely surprising, given the veneration he received in Orvieto with the arrival of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century, especially the Servites, whose annals for 1324 indicate a long-standing annual festival in honor of Joseph. Such veneration culminated in the official declaration of Joseph as patron saint of Orvieto in 1652.

[20] Perhaps in Ugolino’s Marian cycle we are invited to see even the doctrine of Mary’s Assumption as grounded solidly in her day-to-day fidelity to the task of rearing the One who in the end will crown her. And we are invited to see even Maria Assunta not as an otherworldly figure sailing effortlessly up to heaven but as the wife and mother—faithful in the callings to which we, too, are called—and who goes before us as promise and anticipation of our own bodily resurrection.

NOTES TO PART 4: THE CHAPEL OF SAN BRIZIO: END TIMES AND LAST JUDGMENT

[21] Whether or not Fra Angelico had prepared a design for the entire chapel, and whether or not Signorelli had access to that drawing, and was expected to complete the originally intended plan, has exercised the scholars. Creighton Gilbert makes a strong case that Signorelli must have been working with a disegno prepared by Fra Angelico in his book How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 25-32.

[22] In her essay “The Revelatory Body: Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Flesh at Orvieto” included in the collection of essays titled Sacred Imagination: The Arts and Theological Education, published in Theological Education, Vol XXXI, Number 1 (1994), Miles proposed St. Augustine’s account of the resurrection of the flesh in the final section of City of God (Book 22) as the likeliest direct influence on Signorelli’s depiction (pp. 75-90). To be sure, passages from Augustine’s discussion are apt; for instance:

”From all that we have thus considered, and discussed with such poor ability as we can command, we gather this conclusion, that in the resurrection of the flesh the body shall be of that size which it either had attained or should have attained in the flower of its youth, and shall enjoy the beauty that arises from preserving symmetry and proportion in all its members” (Book 22, chapter 20).

And in chapter 21, “Of the new spiritual body into which the flesh of the saints shall be transformed,” Augustine concludes:

”And a man is in this life spiritual in such a way, that he is yet carnal with respect to his body, and sees another law in his members warring against the law of his mind; but even in his body he will be spiritual when the same flesh shall have had that resurrection of which these words speak, “It is sown an animal body, it shall rise a spiritual body.” [1 Corinthians 15:44] But what this spiritual body shall be and how great its grace, I fear it were but rash to pronounce, seeing that we have as yet no experience of it.”

Recent scholarship has weakened Miles’ argument, such as her acceptance of Chastel’s argument that the Antichrist alludes directly to Savonarola, and her ignoring the closer-to-home relevance of Catharism. For an account of Catharism focused on Orvieto in particular, see Carol Lansing’s Power and Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

[23] [to be added in]

[24] The Golden Legend, William Granger Ryan, trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 8-9; the First Sunday of Advent.

[25] The first and only careful study of the liturgical and church year framing of the San Brizio frescoes is that of Sara Nair James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto: liturgy, poetry and a vision of the End-time (Aldershot Hants, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003).