PUTTING ART (back) IN ITS PLACE

The main episode is that of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before his Crucifixion. This scene takes up only the left side of the painting.

[The Harrowing of Hell] takes up the bottom right corner of the immense Crucifixion frescoed by Andrea da Firenze in the chapter house of the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

Attentiveness to such parallel stories ... is relevant for understanding the art in places like the San Brizio Chapel in the Orvieto Duomo where several of these classical descents into the Underworld, including Orpheus’s failure to bring back Eurydice, are depicted directly beneath Signorelli’s fresco of the Damned being herded into Hell. (In this small painting, Signorelli depicts Orpheus charming Pluto with his singing.)

(In this second small painting, Orpheus looks back to see if Eurydice is still behind him, but thereby breaking the condition set by Pluto.)

... Orpheus’s failure to bring back Eurydice [is] depicted directly beneath Signorelli’s fresco of the Damned being herded into Hell.

Donatello’s Mary Magdalene, for instance, carved in wood in the 1450s for a place among the sculptures in the Baptistry, is clearly the Magadalene of the hagiographic literature, not the Gospels.  Her gaunt features and sunken eyes, her only clothing the never-cut hair once used to wash and dry the feet of her Lord, indicates the penitent Magdalene supposed to have lived the final years of her life as a hermitess ... (The sculpture is now one of the featured works of art in the newly-refurbished Museum of the Works of the Cathedral in Florence.)

In the lower more decorative zone, Signorelli imitates bas-relief sculptural medallions in small paintings that depict scenes from classical literature.  The largest stretch of such reverse ekphrasis is the group of eleven medallions illustrating the first eleven cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio. 

The largest stretch of such reverse ekphrasis is the group of eleven medallions illustrating the first eleven cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio.  (The first four cantos are illustrated in the four circular medallions surrounding a portrait of Dante himself.)

  (This medallion depicts two episodes from Canto 2, in the foreground the Angel-ferryman who arrives with a boatload of souls, and, in the background, Cato rebuking Dante and the others for wasting time listening to a musician-friend of Dante's.)

(Cantos 9, 10, and 11 of Dante's Purgatorio illustrated in three medallions on the altar wall.)

The tenth canto includes one of the most famous examples of ekphrasis in European literature: Dante’s poetic description of the work of art of God himself, who carves the cliff-face of one section of Mount Purgatory with bas-relief scenes of exemplars of the virtue of humility (the Virgin Mary, King David, and a figure from the classical world, Emperor Trajan).