Tintoretto’s Heaven is, in fact, congested beyond any hygienic standard. ’Tis a restless, jostling place, unpleasing and muddy in colour, where you are doomed to carry for ever the emblems of your life, where Moses must eternally uphold his Tables of the Law and St. George sport his armour, and martyrs shiver in perpetual undress. As usual, God the Father is an absentee Lord, and Christ and the Madonna—in equal authority, not with the woman subordinate, as in a Veronese in the same Sala—dominate the chaos of figures, flying, whirling, praying, playing, or reading. To see this Heaven is to be reconciled with Earth. Some parts of it are already destroyed, and I look forward to the day when it shall pass away with a great noise. Smaller but far more select is Tintoretto’s impressionist Paradiso in the Louvre, with its rainbow swirls or celestial vortices, its curving sweeps of figures flying on clouds, only prosaic by its platform where Christ, the Madonna, and the greater saints sit like the distinguished persons at a public meeting. His Purgatorio in Parma is equally imaginative, a whirl of figures and wild cliffs and rugged, lurid, serpent-haunted chasms, down which angels plunge to bring up souls to the Madonna, who sits alone in her gloriole. Bartolommeo Spranger’s Heaven—which may be seen in Turin—is a place where saintly companies link hands as in a child’s game, while grimacing demons or snakes tear at sinners.
Palma Giovane tried to cover the entrance wall of the Sala dello Scrutinio of the Doge’s Palace with an emulation of Tintoretto, but the main renown of his Last Judgment seems to rest on his humorous idea of putting his wife both into Heaven and Hell. The use of Hell to pay off private scores is not unique with Palma, and of course everybody can plead the precedent of Dante.
In another Venetian Paradise—that of Jacobello del Fiore—the symmetrical groups of haloed saints in blue and red and gold recall exactly the groups in the La Scala ballet. The Paradise in Botticelli’s Assumption of the Virgin in the National Gallery is also somewhat geometric, though the empty lilied court below gives beautiful relief. Fra Bartolommeo’s large faded fresco of The Last Judgment, in Florence, with its sworded archangel to greet the poor souls as they rise from their graves, is inspired by the Pisan fresco, and is less interesting than that of Fra Angelico, his fellow Dominican at San Marco, in whom we breathe a serener, clearer air, though his sweetness and finish accentuate again the intellectual naïveté. His series of little panels in the Accademia of Florence has a quaint originality, the Judge sitting over a mystic red and green wheel, with the blessed on either hand. Angels welcome newcomers or lament over the rejected, while demons poke spears into the damned. More conventional in composition is his large easel-picture in the same room—a miracle of detailed loveliness, except for the Hell, which is botched, as though unsuited to his artistic temperament. Indeed we know he made his devil hideous out of sheer dislike of the theme. The sheep are divided from the goats by a curious row of open graves resembling sky-lights. The Judge is superdominant, angels and babes hovering round him, the trumpeting angels at his feet. In the Paradise of flowers walk the saints in couples and companies; the sinners—in crowns, mitres, or mere caps—are driven Hellward at the points of a pitchfork into their respective circles, where some are eaten of the horrible horned Satan, some are eating one another, and others are gnawing their own bloody hands. There are sinners seething in pots, sinners starving at a laden table, sinners hung up, sinners holding their own heads in their hands. Demons like brown bears gnash white teeth, and in the north-north-east corner of Hell a capacious big-toothed gullet—horrible in its suggestion of more behind—is gulping down two red-headed wretches. In his Christ in Hades the gentle painter, following an apocryphal gospel, incarnates Hell in a demon crushed beneath its door.
In the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella the theme is repeated by the brothers Orcagna. Andrea took Paradise and suffused it with tender beauty, fitting it with row upon row of seraphim and saintly figures, whose serried symmetrical haloes suggest, however, a marshalling of saints for inspection; while Bernardo made of Hell a chart of ugliness—a compartmental chaos of strange fading horrors—fading though the Heaven has lasted. But it is not easy to get decorative beauty into the Inferno, especially when broken up into parishes of pain and not part of a complete Last Judgment such as that by Andrea single-handed in the same Chapel. In this last, angels carrying the cross and the thorns make a variant in the composition. In the Spanish Chapel of the same church The Way to Paradise is treated as of more concern to mortals than the nature of the goal, of which we get the merest peep; and perhaps the artist’s own concern was Beauty, for the central pattern of the picture is woven by a procession on richly caparisoned horses winding round and round. Tranquilly beautiful are the figures at the Passion, even apart from the tender figure of Christ, whose halo hides the form of the decorative polished cross he bears.
The Paradise is, however, a Dominican Paradise, for this noble fresco on examination turns out to be a complicated allegory in glorification of the order, even including the pictorial pun or rebus of black-and-white dogs (domini canes), guarding the faithful sheep and worrying the heretical wolves. The Dominican Heaven has always a marked preference for Dominican dogma, as the Dominican Hell is particularly hospitable to rival forms of teaching. Incidentally this great anonymous painting is a social Mappamondo of the mediæval, including every type in Church and State from Pope to pauper; the vanities and pomps, the penances and renunciations. A lovely peace broods over this picture, as over all the Chapel. Hell does not disturb its restful walls, save as the mild Limbo to which Christ descends to redeem Adam, Noah, and other figures, proleptically haloed. He hovers majestically over the vague scene, carrying a red-cross flag over his left shoulder. It is only the demons who give grotesquerie to the picture, but they are unsurpassable. One of these baffled imps falls prostrate in the void, another is tearing his goatee beard, a third stands scowling, with folded wings, the hair of a fourth stands on end, a bristle of wires. This last demon is livid in hue; his fellows are more or less fiery.
Bronzino has dealt less happily, if less grotesquely, with the same theme, for to his later vision it was a good opportunity for studying the nude and the half-nude. But to follow out the theme of Christ in Hades would carry me too far. I must, however, refer to the touching conception of Christ rushing to the rescue: as in the picture by Andrea Previtali in which Christ is seen in a whirl of drapery with a streaming flag, pulling up an old woman and a girl. A large cross occupies the centre of this Limbo, to which cling or pray rescued nude figures, while St. John stands by with a smaller cross.
The after-world was rendered not only in painting, but in other art-media. In his famous pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa Niccolò Pisano carved it in relief, imaginatively rendering the faces of the damned almost animal with sin. Byzantine art treated it in mosaic and enamel, in stone and bronze, while on the rich-jewelled Pala d’Oro of St. Mark’s, Christ in Hades has called forth the craft of the goldsmith. An exhaustive study of eschatological æsthetics would include also the innumerable apotheoses and receptions in Heaven, would involve a comparison with Teutonic and other pictorial conceptions, and would range from the pious sincerities of the primitives to the decorative compositions of the decadents.
I do not know if any scholar has yet thus treated the genesis and evolution of these pictorial images. They certainly did not derive from Dante, for Dante’s poem itself contains an allusion to a Florentine calamity, which we know to have been the collapse in 1304 of a wooden bridge over the Arno, holding spectators of a popular representation of the horrors of the Inferno.
Moreover—apart from the demons and chimæras dire on the old Etruscan tombs—fumblings at the theme exist in art prior to Dante, as, for instance, those rude bronze reliefs in the Byzantine manner on the doors of S. Zeno in Verona, which mark, as it were, the Bronze Age of the concept. These, I was assured, were ninth-century, but even dating them at the eleventh or twelfth—and the church contains frescoes as early—they were in time for Dante to have seen them when enjoying Can Grande’s hospitality in Verona. His denunciation of Alberto della Scala for appointing his bastard as abbot of the monastery shows his interest in S. Zeno. In these rude bronzes Dante beheld the bare elements of that Hell which he furnished so handsomely. Here is already the giant fee-fi-fo-fum figure holding—O primeval irony!—a quaking monk. Here is the sinner upside down whose legs are disappearing within a caldron. Here also, in another bronze relief, is Christ in Limbo, haling figures out. Christ’s halo is novel, consisting of three tufts, one sticking out on either side of his head, the other on top. It may interest the decadent to learn that there is also a relief of Salome dancing, in which she anticipates all the modern contortionists.
To pass back from the Bronze Age of the Last Judgment to the Stone Age, that fine old Lombardic cathedral of Ferrara, whose lateral façades date from 1135, shows in a lunette over one of them a stone relief of The Day of Judgment. Flanked by saints, “God’s in his Heaven,” holding the saved souls in his lap in a sort of sheet, while the devil in his Hell pokes up his busy fire and an acolyte shoves a sinner down a dragon’s mouth. The Baptistery of Parma, a structure less ancient, but still antecedent to Dante, shows on its left portal three dead men coming out of their tombs, to be received by the angels or the executioner, according to the dictum of the Judge on high, who is nursing a saved soul. The guilty lean anxiously out of curious stone buildings, apparently awaiting their turn to be decapitated.