The Fall of the Damned

In 1468 the town of Louvain, in what is now Belgium, commissioned Dieric Bouts, its official painter, to make a large Last Judgment for the council chamber of the town hall. This panel was the right-hand wing of it. The middle, where Christ judged the world, is long lost, and the surviving companion piece shows the saved climbing gently toward paradise. Here is the opposite. Naked figures tumble down a dark rocky gorge, clawed at and dragged by demons into fire and water below, some still falling headfirst through the air. Bouts keeps it eerily quiet and precise rather than chaotic, every body carefully placed. The picture now hangs in Lille, in northern France, lent from the Louvre and reunited since the 1950s with its paradise half.