Artistic Visions of Hell

One of my youngest students likes to sing while she draws and paints.  I am treated to all sorts of pop songs and occasionally classic rock.  A few weeks ago it was almost the complete score for Godspell.  She has been told that hell is a bad word, and so had to edit the songs.  This led into a rendition of AC/DCs Highway to blank (as she sang it).  When I managed to stop laughing it got me thinking about artistic representations of Hell, and the cultural history of beliefs and representations of the underworld and hell throughout humanity's history.

I went searching and found an In Our Time broadcast about the very subject.  The program gives a fascinating history of the artistic representations of hell intertwined with political and religious history.  It is a journey through the evolution of humanity's views of hell and how literature and art reflects and sometimes drives that view.

The ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and Chinese had a rather vague and shadowy vision of hell.  Discussions of hell in their literature are mostly morality plays and journeys of knowledge, where the hero needs to journey to the underworld to get information from souls that reside there.  Their visual references to the underworld are vague and shadowy and not very interesting for visual artists.

With the advent and spread of Christianity came striking visual representations of hell and visions of the damned in eternal suffering and torment.  Fairly early in its history Western Christianity used apocalyptic version of hell and torture.  These same kinds of visions didn't appear in Orthodox Christianity until the mid 1400s.  In the 4th century Daoists and Buddhists started competing with numerical versions of tortuous hells.

The Last Judgement, Rogier van der Weyden, Hospices de Beaune

When I was in Spain a couple years ago I saw the Garden of Earthly Delights by Heironymus Bosch in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.  The right panel of the triptych depicts damnation.  Bosch seems to have been fascinated by painting fantastical creatures and imaginings of the nastiest things that could happen to a person in hell.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, Museo del Prado

I saw Michelangelo's The  Last Judgment on the Sistine Chapel altar wall in 2002.  It must have been extraordinary to view during his time lit by flickering candle light.  It was Michelangelo's attempt to put the vision of the Last Judgment of Dante's Inferno into a visual format.  It's violence and nudity shocked his contemporaries especially given the setting of the Papal chapel and its heroic scale.

Michelangelo, The Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel, Vatican

William Blake (1757-1827), a Romantic, started to turn the vision of hell into our present western view.  He could not believe that a loving God would not forgive and turned hell into a concept of the world as it is now, where it is something that we ourselves have created.  Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) used his novel Heart of Darkness to portray a journey of discovery into his own psychological vision of hell.  In the 1880s Rodin started a sculpture of The Gates of Hell, where he portrayed contemporary society as the real hell.  The thinker/Dante/Adam is looking down at the misery of the world brought about by humanity's own actions.

Rodin's The Gates of Hell, The Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich

The In Our Time program goes into a fascinating discussion of an extremely old or prehistoric view of hell as freezing, instead of burning.  One of the guests on the program believed it was a cultural memory from 10,000 years ago from the last ice age when the environment was extremely harsh and humanity had a deep fear of the cold.  In 1922 T. S. Eliot published The Wasteland where he discussed the futility and sterility of life, uses imagery of freezing ice, and questions if there is redemption.  This leads into our current view of hell as generally being one that we make ourselves.

It is interesting to note imagery used in pop culture, for example the White Walkers in the Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin and the Lands of Always Winter, as versions of a freezing hell.