Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Dead in the Chapel of San Brizio at Orvieto Cathedral, painted between 1499 and 1504, is the most anatomically ambitious visualization of the resurrection of the body in Western art before Michelangelo's Last Judgment - a fresco that directly anticipated and inspired the greatest of Michelangelo's achievements and that stands in its own right as one of the defining works of the Italian Renaissance.
The Resurrection panel presents the eschatological promise of 1 Corinthians 15:52 - 'the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed' - in its most viscerally physical form. Dozens of muscular human bodies in various stages of reassembly emerge from the earth: some still skeletal, some half-fleshed, some fully reconstituted standing. The ground is littered with bones and fragments, the air filled with rising forms, the entire landscape animated by the divine command to awake and stand.
Signorelli's anatomical knowledge, which he brought to these figures with a thoroughness unprecedented in fresco painting, was the result of careful study of classical sculpture and possibly of direct observation of human bodies - the same empirical investigation of bodily form that Leonardo was pursuing in Florence at roughly the same time. The intertwined, anatomically specific nudes that fill the Resurrection panel demonstrate a mastery of the human body in motion and in extreme postures that had never been achieved in fresco on this scale.
Michelangelo visited Orvieto and studied Signorelli's frescoes directly, an influence he acknowledged. The muscular figures of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the dense organization of bodies in the Last Judgment both owe a specific debt to Signorelli's Orvieto work - particularly the Resurrection's demonstration that large numbers of anatomically complex figures could be organized in a fresco field without sacrificing either individual vitality or compositional order.
The adjacent wall in the Brizio Chapel presents the complementary scene: the Damned Being Driven into Hell, where Signorelli's demons - some half-human, some entirely monstrous - drive the condemned downward while other demons carry them through the air. Together, the Resurrection of the Dead and the Damned create the complete eschatological diptych of Matthew 25:34 and 25:41 - the blessing of the righteous and the condemnation of the cursed - presented with an anatomical intensity that makes the bodily stakes of the Last Judgment fully credible.
Signorelli also painted his own portrait into the fresco - standing to one side in contemporary dress, watching the scene of judgment with calm attention - a self-insertion that belongs to the long tradition of artists placing themselves within their most ambitious works, from Raphael's School of Athens to Velázquez's Las Meninas. Dante appears in the adjacent lunette, being guided by Virgil through the underworld - the poem that had done most to shape the visual and theological imagination of the Italian Renaissance's engagement with heaven and hell present within the fresco that is its most powerful visual equivalent.
The Brizio Chapel cycle was left unfinished by Fra Angelico, who died in 1455 having completed only part of the ceiling. Signorelli was commissioned to complete the program in 1499, and the contrast between Fra Angelico's serene, spiritually elevated figures and Signorelli's muscular, anatomically insistent ones creates a remarkable dialogue across forty years of Italian art - the gentle spirituality of the early Renaissance meeting the physical intensity of the High Renaissance within the same devotional space.