Authority and vision: the painter's position in the Cappella Nova at Orvieto

Abstract

The paper shows how, in the fresco cycle of the Last Days and Last Judgement in the Cappella Nova at Orvieto (painted from 1499), Luca Signorelli was able to construct a position of authority for himself as a painter within both a history of salvation and a history of art. Taking as a starting point the special position Signorelli occupies in Vasari's 1568 edition of the Lives, the author analyses the range of pictorial means by which the painter is inscribed as both author and visionary: through the ordering of the history of judgement/salvation as begun and left unfinished by Fra Angelico, through the development of novel, temporally self‐conscious pictorial vocabularies, often associated with the antique, and through juxtaposition with established ‘guides’ poetic and painterly. Parallels are also adduced with other painterly manifestos of artistic authority of the same period, though the cycle is arguably unique in its scale and ambition and peculiarly ‘prophetic’ of further developments within the history of art.