Hell Yes

If you’re interested in hell, look for it in a church in Italy. It stands to reason. The church’s goal, among other things, was to keep you out of hell. The process starts with scaring the pants off you. Up there on the walls of the cathedrals and duomos, in frames and frescoes, in statues, and on ceilings are arresting images of eternal damnation.

Most recently I came face to face with hell—its depiction, that is—in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padova. Painted by Giotto and his studio in 1300, the frescoes depict hope and despair, vice and virtue, salvation and damnation. Last year I visited hell in Orvieto, in the cathedral. Those images, some of them shown below, are the product of Luca Signorelli’s imagination, some 200 years after Giotto. In both cases, you notice that one of the differences between heaven and hell is you go clothed to heaven, naked to hell, naked into chaos and torment and suffering. In Signorelli’s damned you can see the impact of the Renaissance. Like Giotto’s figures, everyone is naked; unlike Giotto’s, Signorelli’s are muscular, beautiful, idealized human figures.

Hell in this Padova chapel was so vivid I forgot to look much at heaven. The bloated major devil, Satan, and all the minor demons, are making death miserable for everyone. Satan is depicted gorging himself on sinners (and perhaps crapping them out at the same time) while his assistants, the legion of murky gray helper devils, are doing their worst, and this mayhem is going to last forever.

When they painted these frescoes, I always imagine the artists must have had faces in the streets in mind, their neighbors, their relatives. I’ll make this guy look like Giuseppe; this child, like the one next door. The artists would have been intimately acquainted with looks of horror—faces that had seen suffering and death. The day before we were in Padova, we visited the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. San Rocco is patron saint of pestilence and infectious disease. Plague, of course, was a thing then, long episodes of miserable, terrifying death. At the scuola, a confraternity that provided assistance to the community, suffering and death would have been familiar, “in their face” as we say. Hell was on earth, as well as in the afterlife.

Critics have observed that Satan is the most interesting character in John Milton’s Paradise Lost; that heaven in Milton’s vision is monotonous and dull. In the years ahead I hope I have a number of museums and big old Italian churches ahead of me. (There are over 300 duomos in Italy.) In the past I’ve looked for small faces and feet in museums and churches. From now on I’ll go looking for hell.