‘Comparative Hell: Arts of Asian Underworlds’ Review: Fiery Eastern Afterlives” by Lance Esplund
WSJ Books & Arts | Art Review
Some of the West’s most memorable artworks depict heaven and hell. Consider juxtapositions of those regions by Giotto, Michelangelo or Hieronymus Bosch. I find especially unshakable Gislebertus’s Last Judgment tympanum sculpture “The Stranglehold of Hell” (1130-35), at Saint-Lazare Cathedral, Autun, France, in which a devil’s disembodied hands (like carnival claw machine grabbers) clutch a naked soul, like a fruit, by the head.