John Martin, Pandemonium: The Great Revelation
A colossal palace rises from the flames as a giant army marches toward it. Everyone assumes an assault. The painting says otherwise.
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Every hell in cinema comes from the same place.
In 1916, D.W. Griffith is shooting Intolerance and needs to know what the gate of Babylon might look like. He finds it in the paintings of an English artist who had died sixty years earlier.
Ray Harryhausen, the man who built the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts and the monsters in Clash of the Titans, called him one of the first art directors in motion pictures.
An art director born in 1789.
His name is John Martin, and he paints Pandemonium in 1841. The painting hangs in the Louvre today.
You would swear you were looking at Peter Jackson's Mordor.
The palace at the back
A river of molten lava.
An army on the move.
At the end of the road, an immense palace, and in front of the army a leader with his arms raised.
Everyone reads the same scene. The forces of evil are marching into battle, and that palace is the fortress they are about to take.
The palace says otherwise.
A building under siege carries marks. A breach in the wall, a fallen column, smoke pouring out of a window.
None of that here.
The facade runs from one edge of the painting to the other without a single crack, the columns stand straight, and a steady light burns behind them, floor after floor, along the entire length.
On the first level, stone serpents breathe fire. Higher up, ancient pillars and frescoes.
Nothing threatens this building, and no one is defending it. It is new. It took less than an hour to build.
This army has not come to take it. It has been summoned there, and what you are looking at is opening day.
And this is only the beginning.
You are about to discover
Who the man standing in red is.
What the thousands of figures are waiting for.
That this building exists today, and that you can walk into it.
The decision that will be made inside it.
Where the word pandemonium comes from.