death, judgment, hell and heaven in the chapel of san brizio in the orvieto duomo:

a challenging element of christian doctrine

carlo manunza, s.j.

professor of biblical exegesis and theology,
the pontifical theological faculty of southern italy, naples

English translation by Dr. John Skillen, director, Studio for Art, Faith & History
Essay and translation, 2022

Per leggere il saggio originale in italiano, clicca qui.

Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven. The words may be familiar, but, for most of us, they make us feel uncomfortable, even anxious. We may be reluctant to bring up the Christian teaching about the Final Things in conversation, even though our death is inescapable, and our worry about what happens after death is itself part of the human condition.

In this brief essay I do not presume to offer an account of the doctrine of the Church concerning these four words. (A clear and succinct summary can be found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church [part 1, section 2, chapter 3, article 12].) My intention is to provide some points of reference for navigating Luca Signorelli’s masterful visual treatment of the End Times and the Last Judgment in the series of frescoes in the Chapel of San Brizio in the Orvieto Duomo.

These paintings are not the private fancies dreamed up by the artist himself. We must take into account those who commissioned the decoration of the San Brizio Chapel, the other artists who contributed to the frescoes, and, most of all, the host of people who have worshipped in the chapel during several centuries, for whom the frescoes were intended to edify. This essay, of course, is addressed to those who visit the chapel in our own time, perhaps as lovers of art, and likely unfamiliar with the intentions and assumptions of those involved in its decoration.

A traditional iconographic theme . . . with innovation in Orvieto

Themes of the End Times and Last Judgment were not new in the art of the epoch. But to decorate a chapel entirely with both themes was unusual at the time. More typical in earlier centuries was to place a Last Judgment on the interior wall of the façade of a church, serving as a vivid reminder for the departing faithful of the culmination of the work of God in human history. This telos of God’s work brings into view the significance of our actions in day-to-day life. The spatial design of the final judgment—the damned below, the blessed above, and God seated at the top—underlines the theme. The Final Things are never old news but are always “New” until they are fulfilled; hence we can speak of the Novissimi as the commanding theme of the Chapel.

The key sources of these traditional treatments in architectural and visual design are the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In all three of the synoptic Gospels the narrative of the Lord's Passion is preceded by Jesus’s discourse on the Last Times. Both Luke (chapter 21) and Mark (chapter 13) present a discourse on the future and on the end of time; Matthew recounts more explicitly the judgment at the end of time (chapter 25). Luke concludes his account with an exhortation to his readers to be ever vigilant. The catechesis of the Gospel is not merely a matter of intellectual consent but should foster an attitude of alert attention. To those who receive these ultimate truths in their hearts, this News will forever shape their behavior.

The Discourse on the End Times: a tradition with roots in the Gospels

The discourses in the Gospels about the Final Things can arouse an immediate sense of discomfort and disquiet, if only on the surface of consciousness. When the hearers or readers give attention to these passages, several responses are possible. A reader can diffuse the discomfort by an emotional distancing—which itself can become disinterest. A refusal to empathize can foster an attitude of disbelief, derision or cynicism.

Certainly, the disposition of those who open themselves to these themes is otherwise. It is no coincidence in Christian teaching that the ever-near Final Things are treated at the end of the evangelical catechesis. The writer, the person reading aloud, the hearers, the text itself, have already made a journey, tightening and deepening over time. We must keep in mind that the memoirs of the apostles (the phrase of second-century Justin Martyr, to whom we owe the first description of a Christian Sunday liturgy) were put in writing to be read aloud in an assembly gathered on the day of the Lord to pray together and to stay in communion with the Risen Christ. In that context, we can imagine how the Gospel presupposes a strong confidence and established trust among its recipients. Indeed, a strong relationship allows, even welcomes, strong topics.

Death, the first of the Novissimi, is certainly not a light or pleasant subject to bring up. We all know that we must die, but we are generally reluctant to listen or talk about it as a matter of present concern, certainly in polite conversation in our own society. To speak of these Last Things, first of all our death, one must be able to trust the listener to be receptive to our concern, to be available to us. Although no depiction of the traditional figure of Death is found in the Chapel of San Brizio, the fresco referred to as the “Preaching of the Antichrist”—first in narrative order—depicts several murders, including the beheading of a Christian martyr. The frescoes allow no evasion of Death.

The End Times and the apocalypse

Although we may be inclined to avoid conversation of death, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament do not give up talking about the Last Things. What emerges from the Gospels is their so-called apocalyptic language, an adjective that derives from the term "apocalypse." It is the very first word in the last book of the Christian Bible—and hence its title: the Apocalypse of John. The term apokalypsis in Greek means "revelation," not in the narrow sense of the “end of the world” but with reference to the action of revealing something that has been veiled (thus the verb form of apoklaypto, and the common English title of the Book of Revelation). In fact, the author both begins (1:1) and ends (22:6) his prophetic vision as showing or revealing "what must happen soon"—a phrase that does not strictly refer to the End Times or what will happen after the end of time. In fact, the Greek term that means "the last or final” is eschaton (and "eschatological"). Nevertheless, customary usage has so strongly linked the language of apocalypse to the End Times that we often apply the term to any catastrophe of global proportions (even those imagined in movies) that threaten the end of life, perhaps even in our own time.

In his Book of Revelations—of Apocalypse—St. John speaks of "a new heaven and a new earth" (21:1) with certainty that, in the end, evil and death will be annihilated (20:10,14) and the dead will be judged (20:12). John (as in the Synoptic Gospels) addresses these themes near the end of the book, with its 22 chapters. That is, only when John has established a relationship of trust and confidence with those who are hearing his words in the assembly (1:3) does he speak of universal death, including the death of those who listen to him.

A speech addressed to the living

Even these brief observations reveal something obvious and yet important. When we talk about "the end of time" and what will happen then, we must remember that both the writer and the reader or listener are inside time, and cannot get out of it. (Pope Benedict XVI speaks precisely about these themes in his 2007 encyclical Spe salvi, “In hope we were saved,” paragraph 12.) It is therefore a mistake to think that the stories about what "will happen at the end of time" are like a video-camera that shows us in advance how time continues after it is over! If we are alive, this operation is impossible: we cannot think and live "as dead."

The main purpose of apocalyptic language—a language that uses strong images and expressions with a high emotional impact—is not to transmit information but to involve the listener (or reader) with his whole person, starting with his feelings, which the strong images and themes arouse. In this way, those who wrote the books of the Bible, especially the eschatological parts of the New Testament, are engaged in speaking the unspeakable. When reason and its logic flounders, feelings and affection are called upon to help us enter an otherwise inaccessible field.

The rediscovery of the voice

Theologians of the last century or so have "re-discovered" the sense of apocalyptic language as a theo-logy (in its literal sense in Greek as "speech, or thought, about God"). The theology of the apocalypse is an attempt to put into language the transcendent and therefore unspeakable mystery of God. Paradoxically, it is a way to “talk about what cannot be talked about,” to think with our finite thought about what is infinite: God, his divinity and his transcendence, heaven. Nor is this just a matter of language or of a way of speaking, or of a literary genre; nor is it just ideas or thoughts. The intended effect of the apocalyptic texts is to establish the relationship between the reader (or the listener) and the writer, and to foster the attitudes by which they communicate with each other. These mutually-shared relationships are as important as the information or concepts presented in words, or the feelings they arouse.

In fact, we must digest the fact, not unknown but strange to us modern people, that the early writings of the Christian era were prepared not so much for silent and solitary reading (as we read books nowadays) but for public reading aloud to a particular community. That is, they were composed not to be read privately but to be heard collectively as a community. This difference matters more than it may first appear. We know, for example, the difference between reading a play alone from a printed script and seeing it performed in the theater. Similarly, the impact of hearing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the Ninth Symphony, performed in our midst by choir and orchestra as a shared experience with others in the audience, is altogether different than reading the musical score by oneself.

Hence we must imagine receiving the Gospel discourse on the ‘unspeakable’ End of Time by way of hearing it read aloud as new News, delivered by a messenger. The aural resonance of the Novissimi comes through the very pressure from the speaker’s lungs and vocal-chords, and received through the ears of the gathered hearers, the audience. The whole body is involved. The strong images, the challenging topics, are received both corporeally and corporately.

Apocalypse and the liturgy of a God who became a human like us

There are many ways of communicating and entering into relation with others, and also many ways of engaging in these relationships. The experience of listening together to writings—received as the word of God—would have been woven into the liturgical life of the early church. From the beginning (as recounted in the book of the Acts of the Apostles) Christians gathered regularly to worship, to pray, and to share the Lord’s Supper; it was a way of living, of collective contact with God and with one another. In this context, the Ultimate Things would activate not only individual emotions but a collective immersion in a worship celebrated through shared reading and associated with a shared sacred meal. Such an experience is different even from that of attending a theatrical production or a concert, where we are typically separated from those who are performing the play or the music.

This collective meeting with a God-who-became-man is not just an encounter with a man “who cannot save." Our worship is an entrance to heaven, a door into infinity, but a two-way door that allows heaven to take up residence that transforms the person. As St. John writes in his first letter, our communion with God in worship and sacrament is also a communion with one another: “what we have seen and heard, we announce to you, so that you too may be in communion with us. … These things we write to you, so that our joy may be complete" (1 John 1: 3-4). Although written like other Christian texts that provide instructions for the celebration of worship, the apostolic authors of the apocalyptic texts intended not only to give information (or to declaim predictions about the future), but to share our communion with God-made-man in the whole person, including through the senses, and starting with hearing.

The Christian liturgy was celebrated weekly on Sundays; soon to be established as an annual cycle of holy feast-days keyed to the life of Christ. As Sunday marked the life of the week, so Easter (the feast of the Resurrection of Christ) became the pivotal moment marking the flow of the year—as it still does today. The repeated cycle of the “church year” renews the mystery of our contact with God, and marks our progress in our relationship with God. Experienced through our senses in worship, this relationship transforms our life, radiating more and more through our life, including in the ordinary times, just as in friendship and marriage, and any human relationship that grows and strengthens through time.

Discourse of the End Times and present life

Any discussion of the Resurrection of the Flesh, and of Hell and Heaven, takes death for granted. We have noted the immediate effect nowadays—namely, discomfort— on those who are confronted by the Final Things. The impact of death is no less common to people today than it was for those of the first centuries of the Christian era, and of the early sixteenth century when Luca Signorelli took up the theme of the Novissimi in the frescoed walls of the San Brizio Chapel.

However, to speak of a final Judgment, which stands between the the Resurrection of the Flesh and Hell and Heaven in the San Brizio frescoes, is a different matter. We must keep in mind that to speak of the Last Judgment (or to visualize it in a work of art) in the time of the New Testament, and to a certain extent also in the era of Signorelli, is different than the typical meaning of the “judgment of a judge” in our own epoch. We typically associate “judgment” with the final act of a judge in deciding and declaring what then everyone must hold as the truth of a fact. The ensuing sentence, with its practical consequences of acquittal or conviction, must be submitted to by the accused, and accepted by his human relations. Although the assumption is that the judge’s sentence corresponds to the truth of the facts, what now matters is the sentence, which concludes the history of the case. In a certain sense, the judge has the "power" to create the "truth," or to determine the effects of history.

However, in the world of the apocalyptic, the meaning of "judgment"—its basic principle—is different. The truth of the person depends on what he does. If someone steals, he is a thief; if one kills, he is a murderer; if one betrays (a friend, or spouse, or his country) he is a traitor; and so forth. Even if a person "hides" what he has done from a greater or lesser number of people, he is marked by his history, sometimes indelibly. (Think of the "brand" that marks someone who has been imprisoned.) When an employer is choosing among candidates for a position, for example, it is difficult to treat someone who has been in prison in the same way as one who has not. It seems "common sense," or prudence, to prefer someone with a clean record. If, on the other hand, we witness an employer treating the prospective employees in the same way, we assume that he or she does so out of kindness, even out of love. Such actions have consequences not just in surface behaviors but at deeper levels of a person’s life and on his relationships with others. For those who lived at the time when apocalyptic Christian texts on the End Times were composed, "judgment" was not a matter of "creating a truth", but of bringing into light the truth of the person—not as the truth of events or of actions, but as the ultimate, profound truth generated by actions.

Apocalyptic language, in other words, is intended to unveil the truth of the person by way of the actions he brings with him. To speak of judgment after death (when there will no longer be time to "put things right before others notice it") is to speak more directly about the truth of actions seen by others. Since the apocalyptic "judgment" is public, the presence of others obliges everyone to be accountable for the full truth of what they are doing. A "public betrayal," for instance, carries in itself a full truth: that of the rupture of a trusted relationship. Hence, those who betray usually do it in private, without the injured party knowing. As said in the Gospel: "if the master of the house knew what time the thief was coming, he would not let his house be broken into ..." (Luke 12:39). This is why "the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night ...", but not for those who are in the light (1 Thessalonians 5: 2-4).

From this perspective one can see the importance of perceiving the discourse on the end of time as a discourse from a living speaker to other living hearers. Otherwise, we risk transforming the discourse into a sentence with no chance to appeal. If time is up, there is nothing more to be done by the listener, who is alive. For a listener who knows he is not perfect, this truth comes across as a desperate condemnation.

On the other hand, to be inside the unfolding of time allows one to see truthfully the likely consequences of his or her actions and attitudes, and to change for the better, and to fully appreciate the positive consequences. In these circumstances—that is, when the speaker reveals the truth of living recipients, and of the judgment and its consequences (hell and heaven)—the recipients receive the message as a great gesture of love from the speaker. This profound truth may not be easy to grasp. It does not always appear on the surface when one is immersed in ordinary life, too often distracted by many voices and concerns that run counter to the loving God and the Good. To become aware of a truth that is under construction, yet still open, offers the possibility of repenting from the evil and increasing the good.

From a Christian perspective, believing in a God whose very nature and character is to be loving and merciful, and who has become man to save humankind, this discourse is not only one of "warning" or "informing." It opens the door to a shared mystery that overcomes evil and death itself; in fact, that marks our participation in the divinity.

A thief can always give back what he has stolen, perhaps even twice as much; and yet even if the material damage is compensated, he remains a thief. The only "force" that can change this inexorable fact is the process of penitence from the thief and the love and forgiveness offered by the victim. Only forgiveness can restore to those who have stolen their “innocence.” Only love and mercy can recreate, for instance, a betrayed friendship or marital relationship. To be sure, human love, like human forgiveness, is weak. It is given with difficulty, and can be "taken back." Bound by the halting rhythms of temporal life, we time-bound humans can only move towards the union of love and forgiveness.

Only the Creator has the divine strength to offer full and perfect mercy, to grant a forgiveness that is changeless, timeless. Divine love, like divine forgiveness, is solid, irreversible, eternal: it will never fail (1 Corinthians 13: 8-13). We encounter God's act of love and judgment—whose purpose is to bring men and women to heaven—in the liturgy. There, we are invited into the mystery of the mercy of the God who has taken upon himself the evil of the world to save the world. We receive and celebrate, we rehearse and participate in, this mystery—and so may the people who listen to the discourse on the End Times.

To be informed of the Novissimi is not like having a preview of what a surveillance camera would record at the End of Time. We cannot bring back into our experience of time the events that mark the end of time. After all, not even Jesus knows the day and the hour, but only the Father (Mark 13:32; cf. Matthew 24:36). Rather, the teaching about the Novissimi presented in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, invites those who hear the Good News to receive and participate in a mystery of love that saves and redeems. As St. John writes in his Gospel, "God, in fact, did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world may be saved through him" (John 3:17). The classic adage, "Time is a being that eats its children," is speaking of time as chronos, in which every action that enters the past is no longer available; once it is "done" it is irremediably part of us and of our history. The “time” presented in the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to be understood in its other sense of kairos, of time as “opportunity,” time as an unfolding narrative that allows change.

To repeat, the discourse about the Novissimi is addressed to, and intends to involve, the living, so that they may enter the mystery of God's mercy, with all the consequences (of decisions, of behavior, of salvation) that this mercy brings with it. But here we turn to a work of visual art such as Signorelli’s frescoes in the San Brizio Chapel. Just as the people who listened to the discourse on the End Times, rehearsed for every generation in the liturgy, so also may the people who behold the visualization of the discourse on the End Times in the San Brizio Chapel, “hearing” the discourse through the ears of their eyes. In this light, it is no accident that Signorelli portrays himself in the San Brizio frescoes, readily seen by those entering the Chapel from the nave of the Duomo.

The doctrine of the Novissimi and the liturgy in the Chapel of San Brizio

During the era of Signorelli, the texts and prayers comprising the Catholic Mass continued to be recited in Latin, the original language that over the centuries had become largely incomprehensible to most of the laity attending the Mass. Moreover, according to more recent customs of celebrating the Mass, parts of the ritual were read in a low voice, comprehensible only for the Latin-educated clergy assisting at the altar.

During the earliest centuries of the Church and its liturgy, the words proclaimed to the assembly and addressed to God in worship were understandable to the laity as well as the clergy. With a shared language, along with the shared actions of the mass, the full participation of the assembly was possible and expected. With the passage of time, however, the language and the forms of the rite became less and less understandable to all, and made active participation increasingly difficult. Over time, other changes in the Mass underlined the role of the priest as representing the assembly itself, all the more removing the laity from active participation. Movements in popular devotion over the centuries, however, responded to this impoverishment of direct access to the literal contents of the liturgy by finding new and alternative forms and ways for the laity to enter the mystery with the senses.

Already by the Seventh Century, for instance, St. Gregory the Great (Pope and one of the four Doctors of the Church) could refer to the Biblia pauperum (the Bibles of the Poor), which paired captioned images of episodes in the life of Christ with scenes from the Old Testament in a form accessible to all people. Similarly, the cycles of paintings in places of worship offered opportunities to engage with the life of Christ and the life of the church through visual experience. In places where the liturgy was celebrated, the aim of such decoration was not so much, or only, to deliver information, but to bring the person or group praying into embodied contact with the mystery being celebrated—as we have seen for the news of the apocalypse.

With this context, we can now turn to the subject of this book: the succession of scenes frescoed on the ceiling and around the walls of the chapel of San Brizio, revolving around the altar where the Eucharist was, and still is, celebrated. Contracted first to the Dominican friar and painter Fra Angelico, the majority of this enormous project was the work of Luca Signorelli during the first years of the 1500’s. The scenes, based on the Bible, draw on the theology and doctrine of the End Times and Final Judgment that had been elaborated by the "masters of the Holy Page"—a phrase included in Signorelli’s contract, requiring him to draw on the scriptural authorities (perhaps referring to the Dominican theologians residing in the local monastery, where St. Thomas Aquinas himself had taught for several years in the mid-1200s).

Those who stop to contemplate Signorelli’s frescoes are drawn in by the emotive impact of his powerful images, thereby reactivating the apocalyptic themes of the Gospel writers. The mystery—while celebrated in Latin through the often-incomprehensible sounds and gestures of a physically-distant priest—could be experienced by the worshipping assembly through the images painted on the walls of the building or hall where the celebration takes place.

By order of the client (the Opera del Duomo, the prestigious committee in charge of building, maintaining, and decorating the Duomo), Signorelli had the job of depicting and interpreting the historical and doctrinal references so as to make them present to the contemporary people for whom he was painting. The frescoes locate the scriptures in the present circumstances of the people, applying the teaching to their deeds and lifestyles, their controversies, their fears and anxieties, their hopes and joys. All these were part and parcel of daily life for those who entered the frescoed space to participate in the mystery of the liturgy, notwithstanding their distance from the words and gestures of the officiating priest. From this perspective, the function of images (such as those in the Bibles of the Poor) is not only to explain the content of the Holy Books to those who cannot read or understand Latin, or do not have access to the books themselves, but even more so to involve them in the mystery through the body’s presence in the space of the church, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching.

The rich humanistic tradition in which Signorelli was immersed informs both the figurative design and the methods of painting, and the subjects, themes, postures and actions that he paints. By these means Signorelli pushes forward not only pictorial technique and the knowledge of the human body, but also the visible interpretation of the apocalyptic events and the mystery of salvation that was his task. Signorelli’s work of art involves the participants in the liturgy, the biblical mystery. The final purpose of the frescoes is to transform the life of believers, their ways of thinking and feeling, and in their ways of responding to their neighbors.

In the hands of Signorelli, the concreteness, the corporeality, of the resurrected figures, the connection between despair and hell, the repugnance of the devil and his darkness as opposed to the light and golden joy of God, the cruelty of defeated oppression and the beauty of love that raises and revives: all these elements reflect the way of life and faith of the circles in which Signorelli moved and the environments he draws upon, and of the philosophical traditions that inform his work as an artist. The strategies of the painter draw those who enter the space of worship into the mystery of the Novissimi.

Around the altar

The two opposing scenes of Heaven and Hell—placed on opposite sides of the altar and framing the work of the celebrating priest, with the judging Christ in the ceiling immediately above the altar—challenge the one who looks at them to "take a position." An example among many is Signorelli’s detail of the demon (supposed by some as a self-portrait of Signorelli himself) clawing the shapely girl. Although the setting is in the Last Judgment to come, the lustful desires depicted are well-known in the present life of those gathered in the chapel. The placement of such desires among the damned activates as sort of dynamism between selfishness and "conversion" of those who wish to be transformed away from hell and into the unsoiled joy and happiness of paradise.

Such features exert a provocative grip on the engaged viewer. (Signorelli’s emotional register is quite different from that of Fra Angelico, evident in the image of Christ the Judge in the vault.) The interplay between the scenes surrounding the altar and the mystery of the sacrament being celebrated on the altar may reflect Signorelli’s responsiveness to the “masters of the sacred page” or perhaps is the product of his own devotion. In either case, the visual experience of Signorelli’s scenes draws the gathered worshippers into the mystery being celebrated at the altar, despite the degree of separation between the laity and the officiating priest.

Cognizant of the re-birth of Neoplatonism among the period’s cultural elites who reinterpreted Christian salvation in terms of Platonic intellectual contemplation of Ideas, Signorelli draws out and draws upon the sensual experience of embodied people encountering a God incarnate in His Son, whose body and blood is embodied in the sacrament at the altar.

In the service of a fuller participation, within a choir of tradition

The history of the medieval liturgy marks a growing attention to the effect of visual and tactile liturgical gestures as a means of arousing affection for God among the laity, and strengthening their devotion. The architecture and decoration of the places of worship were designed to enhance the people’s participation in the worship itself. While this attentiveness began long before the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Signorelli moved in this current, refining an artistic technique that captured the imagination of the worshippers, engaging them in the celebration of the “mysteries" of the Gospel in company with the clerical celebrants of the liturgy. (In more recent centuries of Catholic worship, people often spoke of "attending mass," a phrase that suggests a passive watching, rather than engaging in corporal and corporate gestures and prayers.)

Signorelli enlists every strategy—allusions to recent history, the provocative nudes—to keep the lay-people in sensitive contact with the mystery celebrated on the altar. (Commentators of Signorelli’s work in the Chapel of San Brizio sometimes speak of its "theatricality.") The final purpose is not only to enrich the brief moment of the liturgy itself but to extend the transformation of the participants’ quotidian life outside the mass. The very permanence of the frescoes extends the participation in the community’s worship, and deepens the resonance that accrues over time.

By good intuition, or by knowledge of Signorelli’s previous work, the Opera del Duomo signed a contract with Signorelli to fresco the entire walls and ceiling of the Chapel with one of the most consequential themes in Scripture and Christian theology: the Novissimi. Such a project had no precedence in the artist’s career thus far. This painter from nearby Cortona was up to the task, drawing on and expanding the richness of his pictorial technique, while assimilating, and citing, the work of other masters.

Signorelli’s contractual obligation to accept the counsel of the "masters of the Holy Page” certainly helped him to translate into visual form the scriptural sources themselves, along with the interpretation of the Bible and its elaboration in doctrine by the theologians of the Church up to his time.

The result can be enjoyed today: a refined orchestration of spaces, lights, and images of a place of worship, whose main purpose is to bring the spectators-who-pray into contact with their deepest identities as persons, identities shaped and revealed by their works. The frescoes in this chapel provide a window that opens up to the Last Times and the Final Judgment while illuminating the sunlight of God's mercy. The luminous permanence of the frescoes, their open-endedness, plays a profound role in the dynamic repetition of the liturgy celebrated in their midst every week, and for some, every day.

In fact, liturgy and prayer are an eminent way to experience contact with that mystery whose light radiates from the window of the frescoes. Surrounded by and moving through the frescoed Novissimi, the participating viewers have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the saving mercy of God, to correct and amend themselves where evil has breached, to move through the anguish of evil into the light and joyful gold of heaven and paradise, even in the midst of the siege of the Antichrist.

The experience of the San Brizio Chapel—the feast of colors received through the senses, the certainty of faith confirmed in heart and mind and celebrated in worship, shared with Signorelli and other Christians over the centuries—invites us to discover the goodness already present among us, growing towards a fullness, drawing us into that eternal glory where all things in every life pulsate with love.

In his work in the San Brizio Chapel, Luca Signorelli added a new and penetrating voice to the rich choir of writers of apocalyptic texts, of eminent theologians and of writers of the lives of the saints, of painters and sculptors, along with the simple faithful who over the centuries have transmitted in their own lives the mystery of those who pray.