The Last Judgement
Cité épiscopale d’Albi
The largest mediaeval representation of this theme, the Last Judgement at Albi shows stylistic similarities to Italian and Flemish painting of the same era.
Louis d’Amboise undertook to cover the interior walls with 300 square metres of decorative paintwork. The central part of this enormous mural was destroyed at the end of the 17th century. It undoubtedly featured a representation of Christ the Judge and Saint Michael, weigher of souls.
In the middle register of the painting, angels blow trumpets announcing the resurrection and the judgement. The dead rise up from their tombs.
The composition marks the rupture between Christ and the condemned, separated by a gloomy, greenish sky. The dead all carry around their necks the book of their good and bad actions, indicating that each shall be judged by their deeds on earth and that holy mercy alone does not suffice to assure salvation.
Hell appears as an underground world of despair, far from God. Disorder and chaos constitute its fundamental structure: swarming promiscuous masses, pandemonium, foetid, nauseating odours and an infernal din. Monsters proliferate; hideous clawed, flabby skinned demons arouse fear and loathing. Some have the heads of goats; putrid, diabolical creatures, symbolising lust.
An immense garden of torment, hell is represented as a furnace. Streaks of colour show the omnipresence of the fire burning, but not consuming, the damned. Other tortures are represented, the breaking wheel, forced feeding, boiling in giant cauldrons and impalement.
In this terrible world physical suffering (we see mouths pathetically screaming in horror) is accompanied by moral suffering which goes with the eternal separation from God.
Hell is organised into seven sectors, the same as the number of deadly sins. The first, at the left, corresponds to pride, which led Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and to fall into lust, which, with its accompanying punishment, features at the far right.
Between the two we see successively the punishments meted out to the envious, the wrathful, the slothful and the greedy. The lazy and their punishment were lost in the 17th century.
