Höllenfahrt Christi

Deutsche Übersetzung:

 

Erhebt eure Häupter, ihr Pforten, hebt euch ewige Tore, und jener

ruhmreiche König wird eintreten.

 

 

English version:

 

Raise your heads, open your doors, raise the Eternal Gates, and the

glorious King shall enter.

 

According to the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus,

following Christ’s death on the cross he descended

into Limbo and liberated the souls of his ancestors

Adam and Eve as well as those of the patriarchs and

prophets of the Old Covenant. In Pieter Bruegel the

Elder’s (1526/27–1569) preliminary drawing for the

engraving of Christ in Limbo (fig. 1),1 he portrays

this corner of the afterworld as a chaotic array of

figures, everyday objects, and architectural elements.

The Savior, his head encircled by a spherical halo of

light, is depicted at the center surrounded by nine

angels playing musical instruments; the stigmata on

Christ’s hands and feet reveal that this scene takes

place after the Crucifixion. With his left hand (his

right in the engraving) raised in a gesture of blessing,

Christ communicates visually with the group

of Old Testament ancestors streaming toward him

from the mouth of a monstrous head. The heavy,

hinged doors of this portal—as the Latin inscription

below the image describes—are flung wide-open

to both sides.2 The Prince of Hell, as a hideous,

crowned creature, sits in the gaping hole of the

skull, seemingly tearing his hair out in desperation

over Christ’s triumphal entry.

Numerous human sinners can be seen in the

background of this infernal architecture, first

being smoked in a fireplace and then dumped by a

gigantic mill wheel into the enormous pot, shown at

left. References to warfare abound: a crossbow and

grappling hook are lying on the ground at center,

a toad-like creature clutches a shield at right, and

flying through the air at upper left is a helmet on

two wheels that undoubtedly seemed antiquated

even back in the sixteenth century. Such allusions

were topical in the context of the political turmoil

at the time of the work’s creation. It was a period

characterized as much by religious schism as by the

Netherlands’ ongoing defensive struggles against

the Spanish Hapsburg regime. As a critical observer

of contemporary life, Bruegel envisioned Hell as a

scene of torture and combat.

In the canon of Western imagery prior to the sixteenth

century, the rare theme of Christ’s descent

into the underworld was pictured almost exclusively

within the context of more extensive Passion cycles

featuring monumental figures and a vertical

format.3 By about 1550, the landscape format had

become established for the descent into Hell via the

artists following Jheronimus Bosch (c. 1450–1516).

This iconography is among the most frequent in

the surviving paintings of his reception.4 In

the absence of extant renderings of Limbo by his

own hand, it seems very likely that Bruegel drew

upon one of these works for his own interpretation of

the scene.

In contrast to Bruegel’s print designs of the

1550s, in Christ in Limbo he employed the elongated

figure type with the delicate limbs and small heads

characteristic of his later style.5 The artist also

embraced a freer graphic approach than in his early

work. The fine dotting appearing throughout the

composition, indicating the materiality of specific

objects as well as their position in space, has only

partly been translated into the engraving: around

the gigantic Hell-head’s open forehead, for example,

the engraver rendered the dots as short lines combined

with additional hatching, documenting his

difficulties in following the drawing as closely as in

earlier instances [73–75]. In 1563, two years after the

completion of this sheet, Bruegel moved to Brussels.

His collaboration with the Antwerp publishing

house of Hieronymus Cock (1518–1570) became

more infrequent, and he concentrated primarily on

the production of paintings.

 

1. Orenstein (NHD) 2006, 19, no. 7.

2. Toblite o porte capita vestea attollimine fores sempiterne et

ingredietur Rex ille gloriosus (Lift up your heads, O you gates, lift

up, you everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in).

3. Cf. Lucas van Leyden, Christ in Limbo, 1521, engraving,

11.5 x 7.5 cm, The Albertina Museum, Vienna, DG1926/1949.

Because Bruegel’s drawing and corresponding print are not

incorporated into a Passion narrative of this kind, it has long

been suspected that the image might originally have constituted

the conclusion of the series The Seven Virtues; see Borms and

Van Gelder 1939, 37.

4. Unverfehrt 1980, 201–5.

5. Orenstein in Orenstein 2001, 212.

 

Emily J. Peters, Laura M. Ritter (Hg.), AK Tales of the City. Drawing in the Netherlands from Bosch to Bruegel, Cleveland Museum of Art 9.10.2022 - 8.1.2023, New Haven 2022, Kat. Nr. 76