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What Happened to the Last Judgement in the Early Church?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
The Last Judgement was one of the most important themes in Christian art from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. It can be found in glittering mosaics on the west wall of the cathedral on the island of Torcello in the Venetian lagoon, on the sculptured centre portal of the west façade of Notre Dame in Paris, in Luca Signorelli’s haunting frescos in the Chapel of the Madonna of San Brizio in Orvieto, and in Michelangelo’s masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel. Numerous other churches had their own ‘dooms’. A dramatic but not untypical example from the twelfth century can be found above the entrance to the Church of Sainte-Foy at Conques. Christ is enthroned as an austere judge, dividing the saved from the damned. The procession to heaven is neat and orderly while hell is chaotic, being depicted as a hideous mouth devouring the damned, a common representation in medieval art. In ominous foreboding, this Romanesque Last Judgement rivals the thirteenth-century hymn, the Dies Irae, as a reminder of the coming ‘day of wrath and doom impending’.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 45: The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul , 2009 , pp. 20 - 30
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2009
References
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