Hello and a warm welcome to you all. My name is Neil Moore. I’m an artist – a painter to be more precise, - and I’ve been living permanently in Italy since 1988. I’m planning to talk to you today about some frescoes painted by the young Florentine artist Benozzo Gozzoli around 1450 in the delightful Umbrian hilltown of Montefalco, just near where I live, and the Apocalypse cycle painted half a century later by Luca Signorelli, another Tuscan though not in this case from Florence, in the more famous  Umbrian location of Orvieto.

But I don’t want to talk only about art. I would like to draw your attention to the remarkably beautiful physical context that surrounds these fresco cycles and in so doing explain why it is that I find the landscape there so beguiling and such an appropriate environment for art. Most of all, though, I would like to communicate to you a very strong but hard to define sensation that has stayed with me throughout the sixteen years that I’ve been living in Italy and that never ceases to surprise me. Put very simply, it is that the art you see here – and not only the art, but that’s another story – has a “naturalness” about it; that in a really pleasing way it’s integrated with and seems to emerge seamlessly from the environment in which you find it, much as the hill towns that are such a feature of the landscape here also seem to grow organically from the rocks and fields around them. It can reasonably be said that the whole landscape of central Italy is a fruitful collaboration between nature and the people who have been living here for the last three thousand years. And in particular, the landscape of Umbria has a special beauty, where the relative poverty of many generations of peasant farmers has created its characteristic patchwork of small fields on a pleasantly intimate scale.

These are admittedly rather subjective observations and I’m sure that there would be many places in modern industrialized Italy where it would be laughable to talk like this, but the misery and stagnation that Umbria has experienced over many centuries are at last turning out to have a positive side. This area never really recovered from the Black Death of 1348 and during its long decline as a neglected province of the Papal State and indeed right up to the post war period there was never enough wealth here to seriously compromise the pre-industrial landscape.

What this means is that you can be wandering through pretty well any town or village, pass through an ancient doorway and come across wonderful art in the place where it was created, surrounded by walls and pavement and ceilings and a landscape outside that are all continuous with it. Not only that, if you’re lucky you’ll stumble across an absolute masterpiece, there at street level, the kind of thing that would be the jewel of a new world or antipodean collection, with most likely nobody there but you to admire it. It’s the sort of thing that here in Australia we can only dream about. Here for example is a Nativity by Umbria’s most famous Renaissance master, Perugino, tucked away in a church in Montefalco.

I’m sure, then, that you can appreciate what a wonderful experience it was for an art lover like me to settle in Italy and find myself completely surrounded by the real thing, so much more impressive than it can ever be in books or galleries. In my case this applied particularly to architecture. I am astonished on an almost daily basis by the beauty of what you might call the vernacular; the ordinary building practices of a pre-industrial society which seem almost to be the result of organic processes themselves. But it applies to all the arts here and the difference between a great fresco cycle wrapped intimately around the masonry of a Romanesque basilica and its translation into images in a textbook is considerable.

I first became aware of Benozzo Gozzoli because a painting of his decorated the front cover of one of my first art books, The Golden Book of the Renaissance. It was a detail of his Procession of the Magi featuring an adolescent prince on horseback in magnificent costume. This young man was once thought to be Lorenzo de’ Medici, later to be called the magnificent and become one of the most important patrons in the history of Florence, but nobody believes this any longer as the real Lorenzo’s distinctive features can be made out in the retinue to the left of his father Giulio and grandfather Cosimo. Benozzo, proudly Florentine himself, had been commissioned to decorate the private chapel of the Medici family in their then residence the Riccardi palace, and in typical renaissance fashion he used a religious cover theme to justify what was in fact an extended representation of the power and glory of the Medici dynasty.

We see the whole clan with all their courtiers returning from the hunt, a fantastically elaborate procession winding their way through a richly observed landscape. There is a magical, fairy tale aspect to the painting and I later came to understand that this was an element common to the work of many artists in that great, extended moment that was the middle renaissance. By this I mean very approximately the second half of the fifteenth century, when the top painters seem to emerge onto a high plateau of confident draughtsmanship, convincing perspective and rich, high toned colours. It must have seemed at the time that the formula for artistic perfection had been finally worked out and artists like Fra Angelicas, Filippo Lippi, Perugino and Pinturicchio, to name just a few, were able to strike these beautiful chords time and time again.

So it was with great pleasure that I discovered shortly after settling in Italy that in the town of Montefalco, here’s a view of the main entrance through the medieval walls that still encircle the town -  just a hop and a step from where I was living, Benozzo Gozzoli had painted his first real masterpiece. Nobody is quite sure how exactly he came to get the commission but it might have had something to do with Fra Angelico, the great friar painter from Fiesole who had been his master and with whom he had already worked on a number of major projects. Montefalco is very much on the periphery of the Florentine Renaissance world, but in the middle 15^th Century it was the home to some important personalities in the medieval church and is the birthplace of eight saints, a high number even in Umbria. In particular it was the home of two major figures in the Franciscan order, Frate Antonio and Fra Iacopo, both of whom would have been well connected in Rome and perhaps been known to the painter monk from Fiesole. Frate Antonio was important enough to be chosen as successor to Saint Bernardino of Siena as the head of the “Osservanti”, a reforming movement within the order, and in the papal conclave of 1455 which resulted in the election of the first Borgia pope came within a whisker of becoming pope himself. Fra Iacopo on the other hand was a member of the more conservative faction known as the “Conventuali” and in the1440’s returned to his home town after a brilliant career as a theologian in northern and central Italy.

Now in 1447, having worked together in the Vatican, Benozzo and the increasingly frail Fra Angelico travelled to the Umbrian city of Orvieto to begin work on the decoration of the chapel dedicated to San Brizio in the duomo there. Orvieto in these years was in the grip of major civil strife, however, and it seems that the whole thing fell through with only a part of the ceiling painted. Angelico at this point retired to his monastery in Fiesole but before doing so he could well have exerted his considerable influence on behalf of a favourite pupil to make sure that the young man was not left completely without work.

And so it was that in the spring of the year 1450 the recently unemployed Benozzo came to Montefalco. Here it is, perched on its hill overlooking the Vale of Umbria.. He had been hired to do work in the Franciscan monastery of San Fortunato, a mile or so out of town, probably at the bequest of the Frate Antonio I mentioned before whom we know to have been involved in the reestablishment of this place after a period of abandonment. It was the first commission he had ever received on his own  - he would still have been in his twenties at this stage -  and though not a very big one he was able to demonstrate here all the qualities that made him subsequently a major renaissance master. Certainly, no artist of his calibre had been in Montefalco before, and work of this standard must have made quite an impression on all who saw it, bringing as it did the accurate perspective and beautiful colours that were just then becoming the pride of Italian painting. My favourite image at San Fortunato is this one, a  Madonna and child in the presence of an angel beating – very delicately – on a tambourine. Between them is the artist’s proud signature, Benozzo of Florence, with the date 1450, all done in the style of a Roman inscription. It’s interesting to note that the altar of the monastery church once incorporated a real roman inscription – a dedicated tombstone – and it’s probable that Benozzo used this as the model for his lettering.

Having given a convincing demonstration of his prowess it seems that the young painter was almost immediately offered a new and more ambitious project, a Life of Saint Francis, to be painted in the apse of the church of San Francesco within the walls of Montefalco. This, together with the chapel dedicated to Saint Jerome in the same church was to occupy him for the next two years, and is to this day the pride and joy of the town. Here’s a general view from inside the church.  If you will allow me a little detour back into modern times, the earthquake we suffered in 1997 which caused a part of the Basilica of San Francesco at Assisi to collapse was preceded the night before by a major but less severe quake which everybody imagined was all that was going to happen because there had never been a multiple quake in living memory. The town’s mayor, though, must have had a premonition during the night – being a socialist it probably wasn’t a miracle -  and between 2am and 10  he managed to have scaffolding put up in the apse where the frescoes are in time for the bigger quake at 11, thus saving the frescoes and putting Montefalco briefly in the national spotlight.

In this case – here’s a closer view from inside the church – we do know for certain that the commissioner was Montefalco’s other important churchman Fra Iacopo, who was at that time in charge of the Conventuale community to whom the church belonged. Anybody planning a fresco cycle on the Saint’s life in this part of the world would be well aware of the canonical version traditionally ascribed to Giotto in nearby Assisi, but more likely to be the work of the undeservedly forgotten roman painter Pietro Cavallini.   So it would have been with one eye on this that Fra Iacopo and Benozzo together planned their Montefalco version. There are twelve main scenes in all, starting at the lower left with his birth, like that of Jesus, in a stable, and finishing on the upper right with his receiving the stigmata and death at the age of 44 or 45. Wall frescoes, for obvious reasons, are always done from the top down, so the parts first painted here are in fact from the end of the saint’s life. A number of the scenes are reminiscent of those in Assisi but others are new and all of them have a wonderful counterpoint between the well modelled figures and the clearly defined architectural space which is no longer gothic and medieval as at Assisi but confidently Renaissance.

Let’s have a look at some of the panels more closely. Here is the first one, where we see three events compressed into the one image, a somewhat archaic device that shows us that in 1450 we’re still some way from a painting being seen as a simple piece of the real world. On the left is the birth of Francis in what looks like a stable, surrounded by animals. There’s a certain improbability here, as Francis – his real name was Giovanni but he was nicknamed the little French boy after his French mother – was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant whose family was clearly in the upper levels of society in Medieval Assisi. But Francis, of  all the Catholic Church’s many saints, is the one whose personality seems most to approach the humility and altruism of Jesus himself, and comparisons between the two were even made during his lifetime. The painting is thus establishing his high status right at the beginning ; it’s not for nothing that he is the patron saint of Italy!

In the middle there is a scene which represents a visit Jesus is said to have made to the family house when Francis was a boy, - that’s his surprised mother at the top of the stairs - and there on the left you see him as a carefree and very well dressed young man about town whose yet to be revealed holiness is recognised by a poor man who lays down his cloak.

Here we see contemporaneously the two visits he made to the papal court in Rome, the first time receiving a verbal authorization and the second, close to the end of his life, a written charter on which the Franciscan order was later constructed. In many ways it’s surprising that he was not burned at the stake as so many others were in this heresy obsessed period. It was a very dangerous thing to attack the luxuries and corruption of the medieval church. But amongst his many talents Francis was also a first grade diplomat and it was no accident that he included obedience in his trilogy of virtues.

He was no lover of hierarchies, though, and at no time in his life did he ever have an official position. The explanation of the curious scene on the left is that when the scruffy holy man first presented himself in Rome, the Pope was at first highly sceptical but then had a dream – that’s him asleep in all his clothes – that Francis was single-handedly holding up the Church and so decided to have an audience with him. Whether this story is true or not, the decision to take Francis into the fold was a very astute one, and it’s often been said that by channelling the immense enthusiasm that the grassroots Franciscan movement represented within the Church, the reformation was delayed by a good three centuries.

This next one is a representation of the historic meeting that actually took place between Saint Francis and Saint Dominic in 1220, the building behind being a rare view of the original basilica of Saint Peter before it was replaced by the current one, the work of Bramante and then Michelangelo. The image is to some extent Church propaganda. It seeks to make it clear that the Franciscans and Dominicans are friends and work together, despite what some people might be saying to the contrary. To the left we see Jesus in the sky fed up with the sinfulness of the world and about to destroy it, while in front of him Mary implores him not to, citing the existence of the two saints as a sufficient reason. By the way, all the scenes have a caption underneath written in much abbreviated medieval Latin which was a guide to their meaning. Note the difference between the scruffy, barefoot Francis and the more slickly groomed Dominic.

This scene has a particular relevance to Montefalco. On the left is the famous occasion when Francis preached to the birds, an incident which took place on the road between a little town called Cannara, home these days to a celebrated onion festa, and Bevagna, where the stone he is said to have stood on to preach has been built into the wall of a church. Bevagna was the main town in the valley in Roman times, sitting on the original Via Flaminia, and to this day there is a certain amount of rivalry between it and Montefalco which it sees as a medieval upstart. The background here is a realistic depiction of the valley in 1450, with Bevagna under the saint’s arm, Mount Subasio and Assisi in the distance, and of course the town of Montefalco well portrayed on the right, including many features that are still recognizable today.

The church of San Francesco which is home to the frescoes, for example, is the building on the left with the little circular window. The kneeling figures are clearly portraits, faces very similar to those that you might meet in the town today. The monk on the right is Fra Iacopo himself - we know him also from another likeness by Benozzo on a panel now in Vienna - and research suggests that the others are all members of his family, past and present. The monk with the bishop’s mitre is an illustrious ancestor who died in 1412 after a rather controversial career in which he was three times stripped of his bishop status, the other two relatives from the time of the painting. In addition it turns out that the location from which the view is seen here is none other than the residence of Fra Iacopo’s family, the Calvi, giving the painting a further dimension as a celebration of family values, or even, of the value of the family.

This scene, the tenth in the series, shows Francis walking across a bed of coals in front of the Egyptian Sultan in a demonstration of the power of his god over the Muslim rival. This apparently occurred during the Saint’s trip to Egypt during the fifth crusade in 1219, the girl in the background being from another incident on the same journey when attempts were made to corrupt his celibacy. It might come as a surprise to some that Francis ever participated in a crusade but he is said to have made eloquent appeals for peace to both sides which, needless to say, fell on deaf ears. Interestingly, there are some striking similarities between aspects of his teaching and the Sufi mysticism which had then recently arrived in Egypt, so it’s quite possible that Francis spent time learning as well as preaching which would fit well with what we know of his personality.

Number eleven is a representation of the occasion when he invented the live nativity re-enactment. This happened in a little south-Umbrian town called Greccio, a quintessentially Franciscan act taking religion to the people. Interestingly, Francis was also responsible for writing the very first poetry in Italian, the language of ordinary people, even before Dante. The first nativity actually took place out of doors so it remains a mystery why Benozzo should have chosen to show it in a church. Perhaps it was because the analogous scene in the upper basilica at Assisi is also set inside. Whatever the case, with this invention Francis established a strong local tradition of live re-enactments, later extended to elaborate mechanised versions, which are a major feature in Umbria today, towns and villages competing with each other to put on the best show at Christmas time.

And to finish off, here he is receiving the stigmata – he was the first saint to do so – and here’s a delightful decorative detail from the border with an angel that shows Benozzo’s considerable links to the style of his master Fra Angelico.

So much for Montefalco, then. What I would like to do now is take you on a journey westwards. As I’m sure you all know, the main mountain chain of Italy is called the Appenines, and in our area they form the eastern border to the valley and provide the view that you see from Montefalco. The valley floor was once the bed of an inland sea which used to make a great arch up to Perugia where the Tiber now flows and then south again following the river down to Rome. Lake Trasimeno, site of one of Rome’s most severe defeats at the hands of the Carthaginian general Hannibal is a what remains of it, and not far away there is a fossil forest that tells us that a few million years ago Europe had its own 100 metre high giant sequoia trees.

Travelling due west from Montefalco we come to a secondary mountain chain called the Monti Martani, named after the roman God of war, and on the other side there is  another extensive valley dominated this time by the city of Todi. Here it is, a living argument for building towns on hills. From Todi we take the road by the Tiber which takes us through dramatic gorges and by the artificial Lake of Corbara before emerging into a third valley which is the current host to Italy’s A1 motorway and main north- south train line. Here we find the ancient and quite extraordinary city of Orvieto where Benozzo had been working prior to his arrival in Montefalco. On a map it doesn’t look very far but the terrain is difficult and in past times this trip would have taken quite a few days.

Unlike Montefalco, which is principally medieval, both Todi and Orvieto are  towns of Etruscan origin, the name Todi being derived from the Etruscan word for frontier, and Orvieto, when it was called Volsinii, was their religious centre. Looking at this slide of Orvieto, you can see why it never had to build walls. The river Tiber in ancient times marked the eastern border of the land of the Etruscans, which the Romans called Tuscia  and from which we get the word Tuscany, and with the change in geography comes a geological change too. We’ve entered an area once covered in prehistoric times by ash and lava from the numerous now extinct volcanoes  scattered down the western side of central Italy, and the old towns here have the very characteristic khaki colour of the soft and porous volcanic stone  called “tufo”, the material from which Rome was first built. This makes the duomo of Orvieto all the more striking with its alternating stripes of basalt and limestone, and its glittering gothic facade. It is in my view one of the great cathedrals of Europe; an extraordinary combination of gothic and romanesque, principally the work of a sienese master called Lorenzo Maitani, who not only solved the engineering problems that had brought previous work to a halt, but also designed the facade and carved the exquisite bas-reliefs that flank the doors.

Work on the cathedral was initiated in the first place to celebrate the miracle of Bolsena, the occasion in 1263 when blood dripped on to an altar cloth during a mass given by a Bohemian priest in the town of Bolsena, 20 miles from Orvieto and beside the lake of the same name which is the crater of what was once a very big volcano. The Church at that time was beset with heretical views concerning the doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the host and wine are considered to become really the body and blood of Christ, and so the Pope found himself with a powerful and indeed timely new weapon in this conflict, which is also the background to the feast of Corpus Christi, to this day Orvieto’s principal religious celebration. The size and complexity of the structure, however, meant that there were many delays, and by the 1440’s the chapel on the right hand side of the transept, balancing the one on the left which holds the holy relic, was still bare. It was into this context that Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli had come in 1447. Two of the triangular sections in the vault had been completed with angels, saints and prophets, here’s one of them along with a plan for the entire decorative system when, as I mentioned before, strife within the town brought the project to a halt, Angelico retired to Fiesole and Benozzo moved to Montefalco. Various attempts were made in the following years to get things moving again, including an agreement with Perugino who apparently worked for three days in 1490, but it was not until 1499 that a new start was made. The artist who signed the contract this time and promised to finish the work in the spectacularly short time of two seasons was Luca Signorelli, an established painter in his fifties from Cortona, another ancient town of Etruscan origin. It is without a doubt his greatest work and indeed one of the most significant fresco cycles of the renaissance.

Signorelli has left us a strangely uneven body of work. He was an eclectic artist who drew on many of the main currents of the time, though sometimes without bringing the parts convincingly together. But in Orvieto he for once really found his own voice and the occasional roughness or slip up in anatomy is more than compensated by the power and originality of the images. It is instructive to compare his work in the vault with the parts already done by Angelico and Benozzo. A lot has happened in art in the fifty years that separate them. On the one hand there is a calm and static quality, a tranquillity which has implications of spiritual certainty and deep faith, on the other an agitated and nervous three-dimensionality which is a prelude to the great changes about to come. Signorelli, like Perugino, had the misfortune to be an artist at a time when the extraordinary geniuses of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were emerging or about to emerge, and his work after Orvieto looks increasingly out of its depth, but here he manages to establish a pictorial language perfectly suited to the subject and create images which have a power and memorability second only to Michelangelo.

The cycle is known as The Apocalypse series, and is a magnificent depiction of the biblical end of the world, here’s a general view from just outside. It’s worth bearing in mind that the work was begun in 1499, and then as now the end of a century – in this case a half millennium – was the occasion for anxious predictions of imminent doom. In addition, the preceding years had been more than normally full of the plagues, wars and civil strife that feature in the gospel account of the beginning of the end, and the fundamentalist preacher Savanarola who had turned Florence on its head, forced the exile of Signorelli’s patrons the Medici, and only been burnt at the stake as a heretic the year before, was a promising candidate for the role of antichrist.

There are four major scenes, three secondary ones, and an extraordinary mass of decorative detail, all of which repay close attention. First on the left as you enter is the Teaching of the Antichrist, a wonderful collection of human vice presided over by the false Messiah in the semblance of Jesus. He has Satan whispering in his ear and behind there is a parody of a church, on the steps of which sinister figures in black commit various crimes. In the foreground we have avarice, pride, and arrogance, while in the sky the antichrist is struck down by an irate god who might well have been drawn on by Michelangelo for his Sistine chapel ceiling of only a few years  later. And there on the left in black robes is Signorelli himself, looking at you as you look at him, as if checking that you are suitably impressed by the spectacle he has organized for you. With unusual generosity he has put by his side the figure of Fra Angelico, by then dead for nearly fifty years, so recognising the older artist’s part in beginning the series. It is one of the best signatures of the renaissance.

The next scene on the left is the Raising of the Blessed to Heaven and we are immediately confronted by just how much has changed in half a century. The real subject here is not the theological one at all but the naked human body. This riot of anatomy makes it quite clear how much the  Renaissance has drunk from greco-roman sources, with man once again firmly back at the centre of attention such as not had happened for more than a thousand years. And just as this proliferation of carnality would have been inconceivable fifty years earlier it is also hard to imagine it fifty years later in the punitive atmosphere of the counter-reformation. We are looking through a window of opportunity that was really not open for very long.

Moving across now to the other wall we see the marvellous Raising of the Dead. Beneath sturdy angels who announce the end of days with their trumpets we have the spectacle of the dead emerging from the ground, some already fleshed out, some still as skeletons, some even with articles of clothing and all apparently in the prime of life. I’m sure that I’m not the first person to find myself somewhat puzzled by the logic here, and curious to know precisely how it was all meant to happen. But I don’t think that contemporaries would have been much bothered by such quibbles and whatever the case, Signorelli once again invites us to lose ourselves in this great display of human anatomy, the physical surrounds being reduced to the minimum essential. There are touches of humour too; note the conversation between the man and skeletons on the right hand side.

And now we come to the most celebrated of all the scenes, the one where the damned are seized by demons who gleefully begin the tortures that await them for eternity. There is a writhing energy here that has few equals in art,  and a visual inventiveness that made a very deep impression at the time and indeed ever since. Touches like the devil biting the figure who might even be enjoying it are justly famous, underneath which Signorelli has put another self portrait. Here he is the blue devil with the single horn carrying off the young woman, who appears again on the back of the snickering demon flying in the sky. Without a doubt there is a whole level of personalised references at work which would have been very clear to people of Orvieto and Cortona at the time and which allowed the painter to have a great deal of fun at the expense of his enemies and friends.

Turning now and looking back over the ornate entrance to the chapel we see a large semicircle in which the artist has put images from the end of the world. S These are dramatic and even horrifying and include some of the most original passages in the whole cycle. There are eclipses, a rain of fire and on the left some quite amazing scenes that make you think of Star Wars. Canon had of course been around for a while in 1500 but the modernity of the conception and the drama of the figures are really breathtaking.

And finally on either side of the window are depictions of heaven and hell. Heaven could be described as rather conventional and as with the Raising of the Blessed to Heaven Signorelli grapples with the familiar problem of how to make the good interesting. But when he moves onto hell his imagination is once more fruitfully stimulated and the result has an energy and incisiveness that are lacking in the companion piece. Of particular interest is the demon in the boat because he is clearly modelled on the underworld ferryman who in Greek mythology took the dead across the river Styx. We have here a good example of that characteristic renaissance concern to bring pagan and christian concepts together. It can be hard to understand now, but the issue of how  to treat the pagan past was a burning issue in renaissance times, and no more so than for the Italians. This was because the Renaissance was in essence a collective reappraisal of the extraordinary achievements of the ancient world and in Italy this meant the works of their direct ancestors. So great pride in what had been done is mixed with apprehension that very little of it seemed to have much bearing on Christianity, and from early on attempts were made to put bridges between what could easily be seen as two worlds in conflict.

In discussing the Saint Francis and Apocalypse fresco cycles I’ve tried to set them in a context which is both physical and historical. Seeing how they fit in to their complete surroundings is in my opinion essential to getting the best out of them. What I would like to do now is extend this discussion of the historical context back in time to a period which you could be forgiven for thinking is so long ago that it couldn’t possibly have relevance. But one of the revelations for me of living in Italy has been to discover how much the past is the present, and this includes the distant past. To take some examples at random, research into spelling mistakes in roman period inscriptions in the area of Naples shows that the characteristic accent there today was already well established two thousand years ago.

Or look at the cult of the saints that is so strong particularly in southern Italy and it’s not hard to see the polytheism of the greco-roman world under a rather thin Christian veneer. Or consider the strange race of the “Ceri” at Gubbio where enigmatic wooden devices are carried along an itinerary very like that of a religious procession we read of from at least 500 BC. It’s against this background that I want to raise the possibility that the devils we see in the art of Signorelli are the expression of a continuous folk tradition that goes all the way back to the ancient Etruscans. I first had this thought while visiting the painted tombs of Etruscan Tarquinia where you see strange coloured demons, in particular a blue one called Charun  who carried a heavy hammer and lived on human flesh, which bear a considerable resemblance to those in the duomo at Orvieto. The Etruscans were in fact famous in the ancient world for their great attachment to religion, or even superstition, and throughout Roman history the job of predicting the future through studying the liver of sacrificed animals was done by them.

Indeed, a great deal of what we consider Roman religion and ritual, including the form of the temples, gladiatorial contests and such things as the toga and  the fasces, or axe wrapped in rods that was the symbol of a magistrates power, were all taken by the Romans from their more advanced Etruscan neighbours. The Etruscans were unable to match the Romans militarily, however, and as their culture declined the tombs lose the gaiety of the earlier period and become increasingly concerned with this underworld of demons that must have had a strong hold on their collective imagination. It is even said that just like the Aztecs in Central America the Etruscan priests had foretold their culture’s own destruction, and this no doubt helped to undermine their resolve. In this context I don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine that a folk tradition of demonology might have persisted in the areas where once the Etruscans lived.

In support of this idea of the essential continuity of culture in the Italian peninsular are some interesting recent results in the field of comparative DNA. Archaeologists at last have a tool here which gives hard evidence about population spread and the surprising picture that is beginning emerge is that modern Italy is substantially unchanged since pre-christian times, in particular away from the biggest cities. There are Greeks in the south, Ligurians in the north, and in the centre Umbro-sannitics (of whom the Latins were a part) and Etruscans, still living more or less where they always have been. Such a situation provides at least the background for the possibility of cultural continuity through all those long centuries. And having stepped out here onto some rather uncertain ground historically speaking, I would like to be even bolder and float the altogether unprovable idea that the phenomenon of the Italian Renaissance might itself be connected in some way with the continued presence of an Etruscan population in the area. The Etruscans were as famous in the ancient world for their art as for their religion, and their sculpture, –  here are the wonderful Chimaera from Arezzo and  a pair of winged horses from the pediment of a temple at Gravisca, the port town of Tarquinia. Put this together with the geographical spread of the Renaissance which from its centre in Florence coincides substantially with the extension of ancient Etruria and we have a very interesting working hypothesis.

I want to bring all this together by returning to the Vale of Umbria, specifically to the town of Spoleto which sits in sight of Montefalco at its southern end and is the setting every year for an international festival of theatre and dance. This is the Duomo, and this the extraordinary medieval aqueduct that links the town to the mountain behind it. Here too is one of those extraordinary pieces of art still in its original setting and in easy view of anyone who passes by. It is the work of another great florentine, Fra Filippo Lippi, who came here in 1467 and decorated the apse of the Duomo with scenes from the life of the virgin. He was a very different kind of monk from Fra Angelico, and as it happens this turned out to be his last commission as he died while still working on it, the rumour being that he was fed poisoned figs by a jealous husband though I’ve also heard that he fell off the scaffolding.. He was being assisted in the painting by his adolescent son Filippino who went on to become a considerable painter in his right, and it’s said that he finished the work after his father died.

Like Signorelli later Lippi has signed his work with a full self portrait – here he is, the solid figure with the dark hat and light robes – and beneath he has put the young Filippino as an “angeletto” in light green. The father’s hands are significant as he is clearly making a gesture very common in modern Italy which is known as “le corna”. When this is done with the fingers pointing up it can be extremely offensive but with them pointing down as Lippi does here it’s a traditional way of warding off bad luck, much as in our culture we might say touch wood. Just how traditional it was I realized only recently on a trip to Volterra, another old Etruscan town which then as now was the centre of a thriving alabaster industry. It has an interesting museum which D. H. Lawrence mentions in his fascinating  book “Etruscan Places” and a good part of it is given over to beautiful alabaster urns from the third to second century BC that held the ashes of the dead. These are decorated with reclining portraits of the deceased and every second one of them is holding their fingers in the same gesture that Lippi is making, as current in Italy in the third century BC as it is today.