Books
Freud’s Trip to Orvieto, by Nicholas Fox Weber
With a barely suppressed grin, Nicholas Fox Weber believes the homoerotic imagery was to blame and this witty, art-savvy project meanders in all manner of delightful directions to build the case.
Seen from Behind: Perspectives on the Male Body and Renaissance Art
by Patricia Lee Rubin
Luca Signorelli --written in 1899 (to enjoy how different art history was back then)
by Maud Cruttwell
The Renaissance Antichrist: Luca Signorelli's Orvieto Frescoes
by Jonathan B. Riess
How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World
by Creighton E. Gilbert
Jo Walton's novel, Lent.
Luca Signorelli: The San Brizio Chapel, Orvieto
by Jonathan B. Riess
Confessions of the Antichrist (A Novel)
by Addison Hodges Hart
The Etruscans
by Lucy Shipley
Dante's Journey to Polyphony
by Francesco Ciabattoni
Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse
Articles
Forgetting Signorelli: Monstrous Visions of the Resurrection of the Dead , MARGARET E. OWENS Source: American Imago, Vol. 61, No. 1, Picturing Freud (Spring 2004), pp. 7-33 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable Download Signorelli
Canadian professor of English literature Margaret E Owens has the most convincing theory I have ever read about the gorgeous bodies found in the work of Signorelli and Michelangelo. For example, below is one of the most famous images from the fresco cycle, The Resurrection of the Dead. Notice something peculiar about the bodies (peculiar to our 2020 eyes?) In Signorelli's day, theologians and artists were struggling with this notion of being resurrected. At what age will one's body be restored? Will you be ten or twenty? Or maybe the age at which you died? If you had an amputated leg would your original leg be restored at the time of resurrection? If you had died of the Pox would you be pox-free? Scar-free? You get it. The Christian concept of the resurrected individual BODY is quite different from concepts of eternal life found in Judaism or the ancient Greek tradition. It was Saint Augustine who hit on the brilliant idea that we will all --okay, not all of us-- be reunited with our bodies at the age of thirty. Augustine chose this age, of course, because this was around the age Christ died.
Owens suggests --and I agree- that this is the reason being the gorgeous bodies transitioning back from skeletons to the perfection of youth. It was a direct statement concerning heretical skepticism about bodily resurrection--as the dreaded Cathars were known to have questioned, not only heaven and hell, but the return of our bodies. She gets this from Riess above.
Fuentes
I’m really interested in comparing Signorelli's frescoes to Bosch's heavenly delight. I found it so jarring that Fuentes imagined the Orvieto frescoes flying off the walls in the cathedral in Orvieto and landing as paintings in El Escorial where Philip II proceeded to gaze on them and obsess on them just like he did the Bosch triptych. I was puzzled because Philip II and the Bosch triptych is a case of fact being better than fiction--or so I thought?? But how to improve on the Triptych? But the more I am reading, the more inspired and fascinating I am finding this idea of the genius that is Carlos Fuentes.
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