What distinguishes these frescoes is a magnificently just matter-of-factness. Only one question is raised by the artist. Given the literal truth of the Book of Revelations, how would the last judgment look, and how would one feel if he were indeed there? So he reasons it out—the struggle of the skeletons to push up to the light, their reinvestiture successively with sinews, muscles and skin, the embarrassment as a half assembled body vainly seeks recognition. And all this he contrasts with the confident, strong bearing of the archangels above. Again in the Ascent of the Just to Heaven, the aspiration is chiefly physical, magnificently so. These clean strong bodies chiefly wish to escape the corruption from which the last trump has summoned them. And even the guardian angels are less tender than jubilant at the thought of fit recruits to replenish St. Michael’s celestial militia. Equally the damned wince, not from conscience, but from physical dread of the chains and claws and the imminence of the eternal fires. [Illustration: FIG. 176. Luca Signorelli. The General Resurrection.—_Cathedral, Orvieto._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 177. Luca Signorelli. The Souls of the Damned.—_Cathedral, Orvieto._ ] This sturdy, upright art seems hardly Italian. The spirit of it is ruthless and Northern. It mitigates nothing, tells pretty much everything, presents the body in its ugliness, disregards obvious considerations of style. Yet as a successful blend of a vast technical experiment in anatomy with an honest and powerful effort of imagination, this is one of the most remarkable achievements of the Italian Renaissance. It has little of the Italian nobility, but it powerfully influenced those who had. Perugino and Raphael imitated Signorelli’s orderly arrangement of his scenes in a double, vertical order, and Michelangelo fed his dream of a heroic world of splendid nudity from the drastic visions of Signorelli. Over-rich and over-emphatic as Signorelli is, he is also an elemental, tonic power. No one is quite the same after a visit to the Chapel of S. Brixio. If Signorelli was the greatest character in Umbria before Raphael, Pietro Perugino was the finest intelligence and taste. He was born in 1446 at Città della Pieve and at nine years old was put with a poor Perugian painter. His early activity is matter only of ingenious conjecture.[66] There is an ambiguous range of pictures variously ascribed to him and to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, a difficult and rather unimportant problem which I willingly let alone. What is certain is that in his early twenties Perugino was studying with Verrocchio at Florence alongside of Leonardo da Vinci. By 1481 and 1482 Perugino emerges artistically full-grown in the Sistine Chapel.