Hell in Painting: 12 Famous Visions of Damnation
The most famous paintings of hell come from Bosch, Giotto, Signorelli and a 25 year old Bouguereau. Twelve visions of damnation, a demon orchestra playing music written on a sinner’s backside, and the hell panel that crossed the sea as pirate loot.
Abandon hope, here is the map
One hell contains sheet music painted on a human body, and people have actually performed it.
One hell panel was stolen by corsairs and has lived in Poland for five centuries.
One vision of demons was painted to cure a plague town of its fear.
Michelangelo studied one of these walls before painting his own Last Judgment.
And the most shared hell painting online was made by an academic painter the modernists mocked.
1 | The Garden of Earthly Delights, hell panel, Hieronymus Bosch (about 1500)
A burning city, a bird headed devil eating souls, and instruments turned into torture devices. On one sinner’s backside, Bosch painted actual musical notation.
Musicians have transcribed and performed the butt song from hell, and recordings exist. The man who invented this place is in my guide to Hieronymus Bosch.
2 | Dante and Virgil, William Adolphe Bouguereau (1850)
Two damned souls fight in the eighth circle, one sinking his teeth into the other’s neck, while a demon grins overhead. Bouguereau was 25 and trying to win the Prix de Rome.
He lost, switched to angels and nymphs, and the internet rediscovered this canvas 170 years later and made it a meme. The academic master is in my guide to Bouguereau.
3 | The Last Judgment, Giotto (about 1305)
On the exit wall of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, a giant blue Satan swallows and excretes sinners while usurers hang from their money bags.
The chapel was funded by a banker seeking pardon for his father’s usury, which makes the hanging usurers a family confession. The painter who started everything is in my guide to Giotto.
4 | The Damned Cast into Hell, Luca Signorelli (about 1502)
A wall of muscular demons in green, purple and grey wrestling the damned into the pit, in the cathedral of Orvieto. No fire, no monsters: just bodies against bodies.
Michelangelo studied these frescoes before the Sistine Last Judgment. One demon carries off a woman said to be modeled on Signorelli’s unfaithful mistress.
5 | The Last Judgment, hell wing, Hans Memling (about 1470)
Painted in Bruges for an agent of the Medici bank, the triptych never arrived: a Baltic corsair seized the ship in 1473 and donated the loot to a church in Gdansk.
Five centuries later it is still in Poland, hell wing and all. The calm master of Bruges is in my guide to Hans Memling.
6 | The Map of Hell, Sandro Botticelli (about 1490)
A funnel of descending circles drawn parchment by parchment: Botticelli illustrated Dante’s entire Inferno as an actual map you can navigate.
The painter of Venus spent years on the project for a Medici patron and left it unfinished. Why the same man painted beauty and damnation is in my guide to Botticelli.
7 | The Barque of Dante, Eugene Delacroix (1822)
Dante and Virgil cross the lake around the city of the dead while the damned claw at the boat. It was Delacroix’s first Salon submission, painted at 24.
The state bought it immediately, and an entire movement followed the color of those wet bodies. The Romantic in chief is in my guide to Eugene Delacroix.
8 | The Fall of the Damned, Peter Paul Rubens (about 1620)
A waterfall of human bodies pouring from heaven into darkness, hundreds of figures in freefall tangled with demons.
In 1959 a visitor threw acid at it in Munich, judging it obscene. Restoration took years, and the painting hangs again in the Alte Pinakothek.
9 | The Hellmouth of the Winchester Psalter (about 1150)
Medieval England pictured hell as a literal monster’s mouth. In this manuscript, an angel calmly locks the door on a mouth crammed with kings and bishops.
The crowns matter: hell as the one court where rank counts for nothing. These painted books are their own world: what is an illuminated manuscript.
10 | Christ in Limbo, follower of Bosch (about 1575)
Christ descends into a burning underworld to pull out the souls of the just, wading through Boschian monsters to do it.
Bosch’s workshop and imitators ran hell as a franchise for a century: collectors across Europe wanted their own little inferno.
11 | Inferno, Franz von Stuck (1908)
A crowd of the damned packed against a wall of flame: a serpent coils around a man, a mother clutches a child, and nobody screams. Munich Symbolism at its coldest.
Von Stuck taught Kandinsky and Klee, and painted hell as a waiting room. The Met bought this canvas in 2011.
12 | The Devil, everywhere else
Hell’s landlord has his own portrait gallery: goat gods, fallen angels, gentleman tempters in evening dress.
I gathered his twelve best appearances in famous devil paintings, the natural sequel to this list.
Hell on canvas, the questions people ask
What is the most famous painting of hell? Bosch’s hell panel from the Garden of Earthly Delights, with Giotto’s blue Satan as the medieval champion.
Is there really music written in Bosch’s hell? Yes. The notation on a sinner’s body has been transcribed and performed, 500 years late.
Why did painters paint hell so often? The Church commissioned fear. A hell on the exit wall was the last thing a congregation saw before leaving.
Where can I see these works? The Prado for Bosch, Padua for Giotto, Orvieto for Signorelli, Gdansk for Memling, Munich for Rubens, the Met for von Stuck.
What inspired Michelangelo’s Last Judgment? Signorelli’s Orvieto frescoes, which Michelangelo studied closely, and Dante, whom he could quote from memory.
One closing fact: when the Scrovegni Chapel opened around 1305, visitors entered under Giotto’s hell to leave the building. Sinners walked out through the mouth of the lesson.