Orvieto Cathedral

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1263, a Bohemian priest named Peter, tormented by doubts about the Real Presence, stopped at Bolsena on his pilgrimage to Rome. As he said Mass in the church of Saint Christina, the Host began to bleed onto the corporal, the linen cloth beneath it. He carried the cloth to Pope Urban IV, then residing in nearby Orvieto; the following year the pope gave the whole Church the feast of Corpus Christi, and Thomas Aquinas, teaching in Orvieto at the time, wrote its hymns, the Pange Lingua among them. To house the bloodstained corporal, Orvieto raised one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Italy: begun in 1290, striped in white travertine and dark basalt, with Lorenzo Maitani's facade blazing with golden mosaics and carved with creation, prophecy, and judgment like an open illuminated book. The corporal is still enshrined in its own chapel in a great fourteenth-century silver reliquary, while in the chapel of San Brizio, Luca Signorelli's frescoes of the end of the world, painted around 1500, so overwhelmed a young Michelangelo that echoes of them fill the Sistine Last Judgment.