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From: ed Category: Art Date: 31 December 2009 Time: 06:41 AM Review: Worldwidereview has been going for 10 years! here is the first review, as far as I can work out, from around the turn of the Millenium. The archive has changed the dates on the reviews! The Signorelli Frescoes, Orvieto, Reviewer JJ: "The doors of the Cathedral look good I thought, as we stood in the sunshine in Orvieto before lunch. I asked my friend when he thought they had been made, expecting to hear they were precociosly modern examples of 16th century art. I was told probably the 60s. How careless of me. I expect always to be surprised by everthing and don't bother to think most of the time. The Signorelli frescoes, begun in 1499, are surprising in that anachronistic way. They are full of naked muscley men and women. The women have firm, very protruberant breasts and one of the men has one of the most realistic penises I have ever seen in an old fresco,to go with his disconcertingly long aging hippy hair. There are skeletons, and demons, and people with their heads cut off, and everyone or thing has textbook anatomy, calf muscles which no amount of step aerobics would give you, and spines practically bursting out of their skins. If you saw this kind of thing in a kitsch bar/restaurant you wouldn't think twice, but in a gothic Cathedral you marvel at its invention and bravura.In contast the main hall, the Central Nave in Cathedralese, is not highly decorated, and the walls are mainy just cool stone in stripes of dirty white and charcoal,gray blue. Simple and a relief for puritans who hate overdecorated churches, but the simplicity is pompous in its own way. I wonder what we are doing in these places, looking for kitsch frescoes and grandiose simplicity. Meeting our tedious expectations, or boning up on architectural terminology, biography, guide books. Why do we give a shit? It is all entertaining enough, and as good as the lunch we had sitting on a terrace alone in the sunshine, but it is a lot different from the vitality that produced massive cathredals and ridiculous frescoes, and towns like Orvieto all over Italy. It, is the entertainment of the tourist, the restaurant snob, and the lazy bourgeois. "