TO UNDERSTAND THE SCENE

The characters that are around the tribunal are rather difficult to distinguish. They are numerous and alike; they are the 24 elders of the Apocalypse. If they are differentiated, they are the apostles or the saints. Mary, kneeling on the right of her son and John the Baptist on the left can be recognised.

Paradise and Hell are quite opposed. Painters show on one side an oriental garden and its fountain, a place of refreshment, on the other side a blazing furnace.

Paradise and Hell

Sculptors had rather oppose Abraham’s bosom where the Father of Believers holds the elect in a sort of large cloak, to Leviathan’s mouth in which fire does not consume the damned but preserves them like smoked meat to submit them to particular tortures corresponding to each of the seven deadly sins.

The dead are raised at the call of the angels’ trumpets. The dead come out of the earth or out of their tombs; men and women are naked but all the same age. Actually whatever the age of the individual’s death and whatever his illness or his disability; everyone is raised sound in body, at 30, the age of Christ.

In the centre of the scene, one can see the weighing of souls. St Michael generally holds the pair of scales weighing the soul of each individual according to his actions. Sometimes a devil tries to cheat by pressing on one pan of the scales or, on the contrary, Mary intervenes in the other way.

The “elect” are separate from the damned; the former are at the right of Christ, hence at the left of the composition; they are sometimes dressed and they walk towards Paradise; on the left, the reprobate are naked, misshapen and advance towards Hell’s mouth, pushed by fat devils. It is to be noted that nakedness is not extended to the headdresses; which allows the spectator to recognize the monks with their tonsures, the kings with their crowns, the bishops with their mitres…

Angels come to relieve the pains of the reprobate and carry them towards Christ.

This is not Hell but Purgatory, but this representation is rare and late.

The Last Judgment

The Resurrection of the Dead. At the call of the angels’ trumpets, the dead come out of the earth or out of their tombs; men and women are naked but all the same age. Actually, whatever the age of the individual’s death and whatever his illness or his disability; everyone is raised sound in body, at 30, the age of Christ.

Traditional pictures always represent a collective Judgment. The Christ is that of the Apocalypse, with a double-edged sword coming out of his mouth while he raises his hand to save and lowers it to condemn. To this, Gill prefers an individual face-to-face that better corresponds to present mentality.

From the Judgment, Fra Angelico retains, above all, Paradise whose freshness and light dominate. On the contrary, Hell occupies the two-thirds of the engraving by Gustave Doré.

The direction of the composition, vertical or horizontal, has some importance; the latter makes it impossible to represent Paradise opposite to Hell and confound it with the assembly of the saints.

An original detail in Van Eyck: the dead are raised on earth by coming out of their tombs and at sea by coming out of the waves. This shows that there is no relation between the remains of the corpse and the risen body.

In the centre of the scene, one can see the weighing of souls. St Michael generally holds the pair of scales weighing the soul of each individual according to his actions. The “elect” are separate from the damned; the former are at the right of Christ, hence at the left of the composition; they are sometimes dressed and walk towards Paradise; on the left, the reprobate are naked, misshapen and advance towards Hell’s mouth, pushed by fat devils. It is to be noted that nakedness is not extended to the headdresses; which allows the spectator to recognize the monks with their tonsures, the kings with their crowns, the bishops with their mitres…

The representation of the Last Judgment

Relying very little on the Bible, the representation of the Last Judgment introduces disparate elements but it fuses them into an image that has deeply marked our culture.

            The weighing of souls already exists in Egyptian civilisation in which Anubis can be seen holding the pair of scales while Maat tries to make it lean on the right side; here it is St Michael who weighs and Mary who intercedes.

            The Devil, or “the Foe”, has taken on the rags of an Etruscan demon: with a vulture beak-like nose, pointed ears, bat’s wings, and all the attributes of the he-goat that characterized the Greek god Pan, horns, tail and cloven hooves. He is also called Satan, the trouble-maker; he is not a god but a fallen angelic creature that has become a parody of God with his infernal kingdom and his armies of demons.

            The judgment separates the righteous from the wicked and leads them either to Paradise or to Hell, “as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats” (Matthew 25:32); the former evoke gentleness and purity; the latter lewd and diabolical power.

In the Greco-Roman world, Hell is a subterranean place without light, the kingdom of Hades guarded by Cerberus, the three-headed dog. The idea of the flames comes from Gehenna (Matthew 23:33), the valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem where rubbish was burnt (The Second Book of Chronicles 33:6). It has been gradually identified with the Sheol, the abode of the dead. Christians have spatialised the expiation of dead sinners in a place which takes up the characteristics of the pagan Underworld and the Jewish Gehenna.

The elect are “seated at the right of the Father” (Apostles’ Creed) on the side of dignity. Paradise takes up the name and the description of the beginning of God’s Creation: a luxuriant garden, an inexhaustible spring… and adds the angels’ music. There the saints can gather and acclaim the Lamb.

As for Purgatory, it is the fruit of a rich medieval reflection but it is seldom represented.

Linear time

Whereas many cultures see the world as a series of cycles of destructions and re-creations, the Bible mentions a single end of the world that is in relation with the single creation. Time advances in a linear way from the origin to the end of time, which is the definitive disappearance of the created world. The end of the world coincides with the final unveiling and the Judgment or great retribution. This conception has allowed the idea of time as probable progress.