The farther we leave Masaccio behind, the nearer we approach the golden epoch, the more lurid becomes the atmosphere of art. Mediocrity, tinsel ostentation, and tasteless diligence mark the greater number of that society of craftsmen whom Sixtus IV. conscribed (1474, Manni,) to decorate or rather to disfigure the panels of the grand Chapel which took its name from him (La Sistina): one of its sides was to be occupied by subjects from the Pentateuch, the other by Gospel stories. Pietro Perugino excepted, the artists convoked were nearly all Florentines or Tuscans; viz. Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Bigordi, Cosimo Rosselli, Luca, Signorelli of Cortona, and Don Bartolomeo of Arezzo, with their assistants. The superintendence of the whole the Pope, with the usual vanity and ignorance of princes, gave to Sandro, the least qualified of the group, whose barbarous taste and dry minuteness palsied, or assimilated with his own, the powers of his associates, and rendered the whole a monument of puerile ostentation, and conceits unworthy of its place. Nor is it from what there remains of either, that the names of Luca Signorelli and Domenico Bigordi claim that attention which history owes to the first as the real precursor of Michael Angelo, and to the second as the master of his rudiments. Luca Egidio Signorelli, of Cortona,[54] less to be considered as the reviver of Masaccio's style than as the founder of that which distinguished the succeeding epoch, might have led its banners, as his life stretched beyond that of Raphael and Lionardo, had his principle been more uniform. The greater part of his works exhibit the evident struggle of his own perceptions with the prescriptive ones of his time, and a kind of coalition between the barbarity of the expiring and the emancipated taste of the rising æra. The best evidence of this is in the Duomo of Orvieto, where in the mixed imagery of final dissolution and infernal punishment, he has scattered ideas of original conception, character and attitude, in copious variety, but not without numerous remnants of Gothic alloy. The angels who announce the impending doom or scatter plagues, exhibit with awful simplicity bold foreshortenings, whilst the St. Michael presents only the tame heraldic figure and attitude of a knight all cased in armour. In the expression of the condemned groups and dæmons, he chiefly dwells on the supposed perpetual renewal of the pangs attending on the last struggles of life with death, contrasted with the inexorable scowl or malignant grin of fiends methodizing torture: a horrid feature reserved by Dante for the last pit of his Inferno, and far beyond the culinary abominations of Sandro Botticelli.[55]