WHAT WILL THE RESURRECTED BODY LOOK LIKE?Author(s): Paul BarolskySource: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Summer 2007), pp. 16-17Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23207925 .

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WHAT WILL THE RESURRECTED BODY LOOK LIKE?

When we admire Renaissance art, we too often dwell on its aesthetic character without

heeding sufficiently the relations of form to

theology. We thus admire the beautiful bod ies in Signorelli's depiction of the Resurrec tion of the Blessed at Orvieto (Fig. 1), and we

similarly delight in the beauty of Michelan

gelo's even more magnificent depiction of the resurrected bodies of the blessed in his Last Judgment, which was painted under

Signorelli's sway. Doing so, we extol the Renaissance artist's rendering of anatomy, both the naturalism and idealism in the defi nition of the human body.

Signorelli's depiction of the body was, however, far more than the illustration of human form for its own sake, far more than a

chapter in the history of art as science. For

Signorelli was grappling with the deep theological question concerning the physical appearance of the resurrected body. What will that body look like at the Last Judg ment? Whereas artists from Giotto to Fra

Angelico had shown the blessed emerging from their tombs as not particularly beaute ous nudes, Signorelli, in a radical departure

Paul Barolsky

from this tradition, assimilated classical

statuary to a celebration of the resurrected

body as conspicuously beautiful—indeed, heroic and magnificent. Whereas Renais sance theologians, descending from Saint Paul and writing in the tradition of Saint

Augustine's City of God, spoke of the beauty and harmony of the unblemished, perfected body, Signorelli did something they could not achieve in words. As a painter, Signorelli made visible what no writer could: the image of what these bodies would look like at the end of time.

For Signorelli, as for Michelangelo, in

spired by him, the rendering of a beautiful and harmonious human anatomy in the Last

Judgment was far more than an exercise in the correct rendering of the body, far more than the assimilation of Hellenic aesthetics to Hebraic theology. Signorelli's radical image of the blessed souls at the end of time was itself an exalted visive prophecy and theo

logical statement concerning the corporeal perfection of the spiritually virtuous—an embodied spiritual perfection manifest as beautiful and harmonious form.

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17

Fig. 1 Luca Signorelli, Resurrection of the Blessed (detail). 1499-1502. Fresco. Chapel of San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto

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