The Fall of the Damned (Bouts)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Fall of the Damned (Dutch: De Val van de verdoemden) is an oil on panel painting completed in 1470 by Dieric Bouts, produced as the rightmost section of a triptych of a Last Judgment scene commissioned for the town hall of Louvain, Belgium, in 1468. The central panel of the triptych is lost, but the left side panel (or shutter), the Ascension of the Elect, survives along with the Fall of the Damned. The set of images would have drawn narrative inspiration from Genesis 2:10, the Book of Revelation and from the Purgatory of St Patrick, a 14th-century Irish manuscript by Berol telling of Sir Owein's legendary trip to Purgatory. where it has been reunited with the Ascension since 1957.
The triptych was commissioned for the town hall of Louvain in mid-1468, with a contract signed later that year. Records further show that it would have been completed in 1469 and installed in the town hall in 1470.
Writers note how the two outer paintings function as pendants in their striking but harmonious pairing, featuring a green, earthly paradise on the left to the "contrasting shapes, color, figures and their expressions of torment" in the right panel. There, Hilde Clase writes, "in a volcanic landscape, the damned are sinking into the hell from the weight of their sins" in a "well-balanced composition."
Further evidence for the relationship of the two works is drawn from the alignment of carpentry and metalwork for hinges and a lock, suggesting the outer panels would have served as shutters over a central panel while in closed position.
Max Friedländer assigned the panel as one "belong to the master's mature works."
Art historians have found sources for Bouts choices in the work of Rogier van der Weyden and from the pictorial tradition of illuminated manuscripts The composition and mood of Bouts' example were taken up by Hieronymus Bosch in his Fall of the Damned into Hell from 1490 and Simon Marmion's Visions of Tondal from 1475. The painting received cleaning, repair, or conservation treatments in 1543, 1628, 1904, 1941, 1951, 1971 and 1997.
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