Signorelli's fresceos at Orvieto, at once the latest works of the fifteenth century, and the latest works of an old man nurtured in the traditions of Benozzo Gozzoli and of Piero della Francesca, mark the beginning of the maturity and perfection of Italian art. From them Michel Angelo learns what he could not be taught even by his master Ghirlandajo, the grand and cold realist; he learns, and what he has learned at Orvieto he teaches with doubled force in Rome; and the ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel, the superb and heroic nudities, the majestic draperies, the reappearance in the modern art of painting of the spirit and hand of Phidias, give a new impulse and hasten on perfection. When the doors of the chapel are at length opened, Raphael forgets Perugino; Fra Bartolomeo forgets Botticelli; Sodoma forgets Leonardo; the narrower hesitating styles of the fifteenth century are abandoned, as the great example is disseminated throughout Italy; and even the tumult of angels in glory which the Lombard Correggio is to paint in far-off Parma, and the daringly simple Bacchus and Ariadne with which Tintoret will decorate the Ducal palace more than fifty years later, all that is great and bold, all that is a re-incarnation of the spirit of antiquity, all that marks the culmination of Renaissance art, seems due to the impulse of Michel Angelo, and, through him, to the example of Signorelli. From the celestial horseman and bounding avenging angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with delicate limbs and exquisite head, rich with tendril-like locks against the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated, with the head and drapery of a Niobe, on the sack of flour in the Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple mantle half concealing her body of golden white, who leans against the sculptured fountain in Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love," with the greenish blue sky and hazy light of evening behind her; from the most extreme examples of the most extreme schools of Lombardy and Venetia, to the most intense examples of the remotest schools of Tuscany and Umbria, throughout the art of the early sixteenth century, of those thirty years which were the years of perfection, we see, more or less marked, but always distinct, the union of the living art born of the Middle Ages with the dead art left by antiquity, a union producing life and perfection, the great art of the Renaissance.