I’m not normally one to offer opinions on visual arts, as I really don’t know anything about it, but it's something whose pleasures I've recently discovered. I was just admiring Hans Memling’s The last judgment, which I saw on another site. Maybe I’m just looking for distractions from my work, but I looked at it closely, and it’s really terrifying – and not just the images of hell. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t picture heaven as walking naked into a Gothic cathedral. If I were naked, I have other concepts of what heaven might look like – but I’m too bashful to share them here.
What I did find interesting about the painting is how it illustrates how Medieval Europeans really saw the world as a battle ground between good and evil, or God and the Devil. Look at the centre frame, with St. Michael (I think) and his (or is it His, in the case of a saint?) angels fighting for the souls of the naked. Presumably the good and naked. I particularly like the image of the person/soul, just at St. Michael’s right hip, who’s caught in the grips of a devil, but being pulled from towards heaven by an angel – with a spear! Does this mean the forces of good use the same weapons as the forces of evil to win a soul? I’m not sure. But I do like the graphic and personal illustration of that particular struggle, as if, despite what the Church has always taught, it’s not man who freely chooses his destiny, but rather God or the Devil. Why would an angel have to fight for a soul like that if its fate had already been determined by the person's actions on earth? And does that mean there might be good souls who actually are lost to hell because an angel (I only see one in the middle frame) couldn’t get to that soul in time?
I really wonder how literally most Europeans took the ideas of heaven and hell at the time. I’d think that in a world bereft of the visual imagery that so overwhelms us, and in which most people were illiterate and so got their ideas about the world mostly through graphic arts (especially in Church), seeing such a picture must have been horrifying.
What I did find interesting about the painting is how it illustrates how Medieval Europeans really saw the world as a battle ground between good and evil, or God and the Devil. Look at the centre frame, with St. Michael (I think) and his (or is it His, in the case of a saint?) angels fighting for the souls of the naked. Presumably the good and naked. I particularly like the image of the person/soul, just at St. Michael’s right hip, who’s caught in the grips of a devil, but being pulled from towards heaven by an angel – with a spear! Does this mean the forces of good use the same weapons as the forces of evil to win a soul? I’m not sure. But I do like the graphic and personal illustration of that particular struggle, as if, despite what the Church has always taught, it’s not man who freely chooses his destiny, but rather God or the Devil. Why would an angel have to fight for a soul like that if its fate had already been determined by the person's actions on earth? And does that mean there might be good souls who actually are lost to hell because an angel (I only see one in the middle frame) couldn’t get to that soul in time?
I really wonder how literally most Europeans took the ideas of heaven and hell at the time. I’d think that in a world bereft of the visual imagery that so overwhelms us, and in which most people were illiterate and so got their ideas about the world mostly through graphic arts (especially in Church), seeing such a picture must have been horrifying.
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