Hell

A phantasmagorical vision of Hell, populated by demons, monsters and metamorphosed creatures, this little-known work is one of the finest and most impressive examples of Jan Breughel the Elder’s famous ‘Hell’ landscapes. It has the distinction of being a unique composition and, moreover, with the exception of a picture in the Ambrosiana, Milan, is the only pure Hell scene in which the artist gave himself free reign to explore the subject without the pretext of a specific narrative. All of the other explorations of the theme depend on either classical myths or Christian subjects.

Despite the relatively small quantity of Hell scenes that Breughel painted, they had a major impact on his reputation even during his own lifetime and became one of the most celebrated aspects of his output. Fewer than twenty exist, all painted early in the artist’s career between 1594 and 1604. These works are all painted on copper supports that conform to a standard size of approximately 25 x 35 cm. The whole group comprises: four versions of Christ in Limbo, including the work of 1594 (Rome, Galleria Colonna) and 1597 (The Hague, Mauritshuis); four versions of Orpheus singing for Pluto and Proserpina, respectively in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence, the Galleria Colonna, Rome, with Johnny Van Haeften, London, in 1988, and Christie’s, Paris, 16 June 2021, lot 13 (€1.55 million); six treatments of Aeneas in the Underworld, with dated examples from 1594 (Rome, Galleria Colonna), 1598 (Sotheby’s, London, 4 July 2007, lot 20, £1.94 million), and 1600 (Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum); a painting of Juno in the Underworld from 1596 (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie); and the aforementioned Hell in Milan, dated to circa 1595.

Unhindered by any narrative element, Breughel throws himself into the full horrors of Hell, in an endless wasteland governed by devils and monsters, potted and scarred with fiery chasms and bizarre torture devices. Although no specific myth is represented, it seems clear that the Hell he presents is not that of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but that of the classical Underworld. Winding through the craggy landscape is a river feeding a great lake in the distant background; in the estuary, picked out by Breughel's delicate, miniaturist depiction of detail, boats can be seen to dock, delivering the shades of the recently departed, piloted, according to the poets, by the immortal ferryman Charon. In the middle ground at right, one sees a turbaned figure holding court, sceptre in hand; this is surely meant to be King Minos, one of the three judges of the Underworld, whose special task is the sentencing of the greatest sinners, those who will be condemned to Tartarus. This, the deepest pit of the Underworld to the Greeks and Romans, was where the truly damned were cast to suffer eternal agony, described by Virgil with a flaming pit in the earth twice as deep as Heaven is high – perhaps the very crevice into which the doomed souls are here stuffed by attendant demons in the left foreground. In his Inferno, Dante describes King Minos sitting at the entrance to the second circle – the beginning of hell proper – as half-man, half-reptile, with the tail of a snake, a description that Breughel acknowledges in the inclusion of his raised claw-like hand. Roaming around this fearsome judge are both naked bodies, stripped of their worldly possessions, and richly-dressed women, a recurrent motif in such hell scenes, typically an indictment of vanity and loose morals.

Among the countless learned allusions and witty pictorial quotes, Breughel references both classical literature and the Northern artistic precedents with which he would have been familiar from an early age, while also hinting at a deep knowledge of and love for Italian culture, both pictorial and literary. Breughel lived in Italy for almost seven years at the start of his career (1589-1596), with periods in Naples, Rome and Milan. In Rome, he belonged to a closely-knit circle of Northern artists, including Paul Brill and Hans Rottenhammer, who together pioneered a new level of artistic excellence in small, finely-painted coppers such as this one. In Italy, Breughel won the patronage of a cultivated elite, which included Cardinal Federico Borromeo, who would remain a lifelong supporter, and Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, who commissioned a number of Hell scenes, three of which are still in the Galleria Colonna today. Perhaps the most striking Italian influence can be seen in the figure at the extreme left of the composition, which, despite being completely buried in shadow against the fiery backdrop of the flame pit beyond, dominates the composition with its naturalism and scale, emerging towards the viewer as though it is about to step out of the picture plane. This pays tribute to what is perhaps the greatest of all Hell scenes, Michelangelo's Last Judgment fresco for the Sistine Chapel (1536-1541). The raised arm and marked contrapposto of this pose recalls that of Michelangelo's wrathful Christ, and especially that of a saint at right. The influence of Dante, the titan of Italian letters, is equally indisputable; together with the reptilian judge-king Minos, Brueghel includes waterways crossed by gloomy bridges, as in Dante's eighth circle near the centre of the panel, and souls swimming in the river, trapped in its heavy waters, withdrawn ‘into a black sulkiness which can find no joy in God or man or the universe’.

Peopled with hybrid monsters first invented by Bosch and his followers, Breughel's surreal population of this Hell is charged with a dramatic intensity, which he would have also observed in the densely packed bodies and monsters of Frans Floris's masterful Saint Michael altarpiece, commissioned by the Antwerp Guild of Swordsmen (1554; Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten). Influences also came closer to home, with Breughel's own father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, creating the same high drama in his The Archangel Michael slaying the Apocalyptic Dragon (1562; Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique; fig. 1). A quieter tribute to Pieter the Elder also rests in the vertiginous instruments of torture set against the fiery sky on the horizon, upper left, recalling earlier works such as his Triumph of Death (circa 1562; Madrid, Museo del Prado).