Demonic Visions. Depictions of Hell in the City of the Popes in the Middle Ages.

CYCLE: Open Doors. Rome through the centuries, at the center of the world.
SPEAKER: Andrea Gamberini
DATE: Thursday, May 22, 6 p.m.

For the men and women of the Middle Ages, Hell was a constant, almost obsessive presence: preachers evoked it, street performers staged it, poets and men of letters described it, and above all, artists depicted it in churches. But what was the purpose of those images? Far from aiming merely to direct the faithful on the right path, such depictions were often the carrier of more focused content, not without

political and social implications. Underlying it was, in fact, a communicative mechanism that was as effective as it was topical: since negative examples (and such, after all, were the damned in the eyes of the beholder) existed only as a function of positive ones, depicting certain sinners constituted a way of directing the behavior of the faithful in a mirror-image direction. Painting the hereafter thus became a way of building the hereafter: with its values and rules.

Andrea Gamberini is professor of medieval history at the University of Milan, where he directs the “Federico Chabod” Department of Historical Studies. He has written several volumes on the political and social history of the late Middle Ages. Most recently, “Medieval Hells Painting the World of the Dead to Guide the Society of the Living” (Rome, Viella, 2021).

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