PICTURES OF THE BIBLE  © Serge Ceruti and Gérard  Dufour 2008

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The Last Judgment; miniature on vellum; from a Dutch Book of Hours; manuscript KB 76 G 9; Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague

 Museum  Meermanno

 

 

The Last Judgment

 

 TO UNDERSTAND THE SCENE

 

WHAT YOU CAN SEE IN THIS PICTURE 

Two quite separate parts: the heaven and the earth

In the heaven, the risen Christ (he still has the marks of his nails) is in his luminous glory. He is a judge, he blesses with his right hand and condemns with his left one. Two persons implore his mercy: Mary, his mother and St John the Baptist (the latter shows no distinctive sign but he is always present).

On the earth, the dead are raised; one cannot see them come out of their tombs but 3 angels blow the trumpets of the last Resurrection. An angel and a demon share those who have been judged. The angel pushes the saved towards Paradise whose door resembles that of a church. They are welcome by St Peter. The demon pushes the damned towards Hell whose door is the devil’s mouth.

 

 

... AND IN OTHER PICTURES 

At the top of the composition, Christ Judge; he is always sitting on a throne, often placed under the sky, with the sun, the moon and a rainbow.

He is either portrayed as in the Book of Revelation, with a double-edged sword coming out of his mouth while he raises his hand to save and lowers it to condemn.

Or, in a more evangelical way, he opens and stretches his arms or raises his hand as a sign of benediction and shows his wounds while the angels bear the instruments of the Passion. The latter representation is later than the former one.

 

DIFFERENCES

 
 

The Last Judgment; Fra ANGELICO; 1432-35; tempera on wood; Museo di San Marco, Florence

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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.

 

 

The Last Judgment; 12th century; tympanum; St Foy; Conques, France

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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 Last Judgment; Hans MEMLING; 1467-71, oil on wood; triptych; Muzeum Naradowe, Gdansk, Poland

CGFA - A Virtual Art Museum

 

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…

 

Giuseppe Badarocco - Intercession de la Vierge et de saint Joseph auprès  de la Trinité pour les âmes du purgatoire - Photo Direction du Patrimoine de la ville de Bastia, cl. Ph. Jambert

The Intercession of the Virgin and St Joseph to the Trinity for the Souls of Purgatory ; Giuseppe Badaracco;  church of St John the Baptist, Bastia, Corsica

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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 BIBLICAL NARRATIVE

 

The Last Judgment; miniature on vellum; from a Dutch Book of Hours; manuscript KB 76 G 9; Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague

 Museum Meermanno

 

The Last Judgment

The Last Judgment is based primarily on two biblical texts but many other elements have been added.

The Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 25

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:  And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King shall say to those on his right hand, Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. (Matthew 25:31-34)

 

The Book of Revelation, chapter 20

And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. (Revelation 20:11-12)

 

 

SIMILAR PICTURES

The Last Judgment

 

 

The Last Judgment; miniature on vellum; from a Dutch Book of Hours; manuscript KB 76 G 9; Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague

 Museum  Meermanno

 

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.

 

The Resurrection of the Flesh; Luca SIGNORELLI; 1499-1502; fresco; Chapel of San Brizio, Cathedral, Orvieto, Italy.

CGFA - A Virtual Art Museum

 

 

The Last Judgment; Pieter POURBUS; 1551; oil on oak panel; Groeninge Museum; Brugge, Belgium.

Web Gallery of Art

 

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.

 

 

The Last Judgment; c. 1450; pen and coloured drawing; from the “Speculum Humanae Salvationis”; manuscript MMW 10 B 34; Museum Meermanno Westreenianum; Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague

 Museum Meermanno

 

 

The Last Judgment; Eric GILL; 1917; print; Tate Collection, London

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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 Last Judgment; Fra ANGELICO; 1432-35; tempera on wood; Museo di San Marco, Florence

 Digilander

 

 

The Last Judgment; Gustave DORÉ; 1865; engraving; from “The Holy Bible”.

Education Environnement

 

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.

 

The Last Judgment; Stefan LOCHNER; c. 1435; oil on oak; Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany

Web Gallery of Art

 

 

The Last Judgment; workshop of Jan van EYCK; 1420-25; oil on panel; Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York.

CGFA - A Virtual Art Museum

 

The arrangement in horizontal registers is upset by Michelangelo who paints a judgment, in which vertical lines render the fall and salvation. Rubens takes up this movement while intensifying it by a sort of spiral

 

The Last Judgment; MICHELANGELO Buonarroti; 1537-41; fresco; Cappella Sistina, Vatican

Web Gallery of Art

 

 

Small Last Judgment; Peter Paul RUBENS; oil on wood; Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany

Web Gallery of Art

 

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 Last Judgment; Rogier van der WEYDEN; 1446-52, oil on wood; Musée de l’Hôtel-Dieu, Beaune, France.

Web Gallery of Art

 

 

The Last Judgment; Hans MEMLING; 1467-71, oil on wood; triptych; Muzeum Naradowe, Gdansk, Poland.

CGFA - A Virtual Art Museum

 

 

 

FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS

 

 

The Last Judgment; miniature on vellum; from a Dutch Book of Hours; manuscript KB 76 G 9; Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague

 Museum  Meermanno

 

The Last Judgment

 

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.

 

 

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BIBLE PICTURES   © Serge Ceruti and Gérard  Dufour 2008