Il terrore di que’ giorni: Michelangelo e Signorelli

Abstract

This article has as starting point an expression used by Giorgio Vasari in Michelangelo Buonarroti’s biography, on which Luiz Marques observes an important and discreet critical gesture. He notes that the expression “il terrore di que’ giorni”, present in Michelangelo’s description of the Last Judgment, is repeated twice in the Vite: in the description of Luca Signorelli’s cycle of Orvietan frescoes and in the description of the scene of the Universal flood, in the vault of the Sistine chapel. Admitting the hypothesis that this is a Vasari’s rhetorical strategy aiming at constructing a series of images, what interpretative consequences does this expression cause?