Many religions have some variation of Hell, that final destination for unrepentant sinners—the likes of child molesters, serial killers, Hitler, Osama bin Laden—who will suffer unthinkable horrors for eternity. Those who believe in its existence have images of what that might be like. For Elaine Benes on Seinfeld, it’s “the worst place in the world, with devils and those caves and the ragged clothing and the heat, my God, the heat!” For artists around the globe, however, it’s much, much worse, filled with barbaric demons desecrating human bodies over and over and over in an unrelenting nightmare of agony. Over the centuries, they have created some astoundingly horrifying images of Hell that, sure as hell, will never be forgotten. These are my favorites.

#1 Crucifixion and Last Judgement, by Jan van Eyck and an unnamed assistant (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)

The right half of this diptych, completed in about 1440, will make you never do anything wrong again. Never. For the rest of your life. If this is what may await you, you may very well do everything you can to become a saint. Divided into horizontal thirds, the top of Last Judgement represents Heaven, populated by Jesus, Mary, John the Baptist, saints and the Apostles, kings and bishops and cardinals, wealthy folk and poor folk. The center band is dominated by a colorful Archangel Michael; on either side of him, souls rising from their tombs and from the sea reach heavenward with extended arms, hoping for salvation. Below Michael, a massive grinning skeleton extends his wings, arms, and legs over the mountain of condemned souls beneath him. The damned fall head-first into a tumultuous Hell, where they face unimaginable horrors and tortures. It’s an astoundingly violent and disconcerting scene, and you can almost hear the screams and agony of the damned. A collection of ferocious zoomorphic monsters torment them, their voracious appetites for inflicting unspeakable pain never to be sated. Beasts with spooky eyes and razor-sharp fangs tear into human flesh. Other mutant creatures rip bodies apart or plunge their own body parts right through abdomens and backs and mouths. A black bird with ram horns uses its beak to puncture a man’s face. Grotesqueries devour a person through a mouth where its stomach should be or use spiky limbs to drag people into eternal damnation. A lizard-shaped fiend devours a man, head-first. More than one of the condemned, so horrified by the terrifying ordeal, look like they’re trying to rip out their own eyes so that they won’t have to witness the barbarities all around them. No one is spared—van Eyck daringly included kings and members of the clergy in the population of Hell. I guarantee that you’ll have nightmares if you stare at this painting for too long. But you also might wake up the next morning with a resolution to immediately stop doing whatever it is that can send you here upon your final judgment.

#2 Hell, unknown artist (National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon, Portugal)

This painting, four feet high and nearly twice as wide, was completed in around 1511 by an unknown Portuguese artist and can give you the chills. In the upper right corner, the condemned fall into Hell. In the center, five people, including two monks (no one is spared from going to Hell if their earthly life was sinful), sit in a boiling cauldron. A trio of naked women (representing the deadly sin of lust) hang upside-down over heated coals, their hair smoldering and about the catch fire. Terrifying demonic creatures torture the damned with sharp instruments and chains, and force-feed hot stones or whatever is pouring out of a pig’s neck into the mouths of their collared victims (gluttony). A fearsome Lucifer sits on an African throne, dressed in a headdress and a feather costume similar to those worn by Brazilian Indians, holding a horn from Benin and watching gleefully over his diabolical domain.

#3 The Last Judgment, by Pieter Huys (The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland)

One of the best things to see in Baltimore is the outstanding Walters Art Museum. Here, amid its vast collection, I found The Last Judgment, completed in 1570 by Pieter Huys, an imitator of Hieronymus Bosch (the Dutch artist whose scenes of Hell were enormously popular in 16th-century Europe). Measuring nearly four feet high and three feet wide, Christ, the Twelve Apostles, and angels in a foreboding cloud look down at an apocalyptic nightmare. In the middle section, angels and demons battle for those borderline souls, but below that, all is lost. Hideous creatures—half human, half animal—corral the damned and lead them to Hell, where ghoulish creatures torture them forever. A glutton whose distended stomach is about to explode is being force-fed. A woman on the back of a larger-than-life quail-like creature with human legs that has just laid an egg jousts with an oncoming person on the back of a mallard. A demon begins to gut one of the two bound people about to be lowered into a bubbling cauldron, its flames stoked by a half human-half fish and a bizarre third human-third bird-third pitcher. Another twisted figure raises and dunks a man by his hair in greasy water, using a paddle to strike his head—the blood is visible on the creature’s arm as well as the man’s back. In the background, an arched entryway leads to what can only be described as an exploding furnace, with a heat so intense that it looks like it would rival the sun. This is not the place you want to end up at the end of your life.

#4 Christ’s Descent Into Hell (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)

In this feverish depiction of Hell, completed by an unknown artist around 1555 in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, a vast, desolate landscape spreads out over a canvas nearly two feet tall and four feet wide. That size gave the artist plenty of real estate to create a nightmarish scene that will scare the living hell out of you. Rocky towers, blazing caves, putrid water, raging fires, and smoke-filled air compose the daunting terrain. Lucifer’s minions, goblins, and monsters chase the sinners around, brandishing frightening weapons. The more details I noticed, the more macabre I found this piece to be: the larger-than-life-size rodent with some pretty sharp teeth; a human face imposed on a bird, reading a book that rests on the buttocks of several people; a building entered via the one-toothed mouth of a tilted-back, pallid head, with bodies tumbling out of the eye socket; a demon dragging a dead, bloated horse from a cave; a fish with grasshopper legs. In the center, figures scramble up to the top of a ruined tower surrounded by an abyss. Here, you’ll find Adam and Eve on their knees, Abraham and the sacrificial ram, and Noah holding a miniature ark. They all face toward Christ, who holds up a light as He breaks down the gates of Hell and emerges from a tunnel. It’s bizarre and surreal, and it’s a painting you’re unlikely to forget.

#5 The Last Judgment, by David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl (The Great Church [Storkyrkan], Stockholm, Sweden)

Born in Germany and educated in the Netherlands, David Klöcker added the surname Ehrenstrahl when he was raised to the Swedish nobility in 1674. He became a court painter in his adopted country and, in 1696, created The Last Judgment. Originally hung in the Tre Kronor castle in Stockholm, the painting survived the fire that destroyed the castle. It was cut into several narrow strips, then rolled up, brought to The Great Church, and reassembled. Its provenance is highly apropos—The Last Judgment features lots of figures burning among the flames of Hell. At the top, a cool Jesus, clad in blue, welcomes the good souls into Heaven, but, as your eye travels down the painting, things get nastier in Hell. Demons with claws and wings grasp at the eternally damned, grabbing their hair and flinging lightning bolts at them as they tumble over themselves in a sheer panic and unending misery. It’s a frightening scene, made even more so by the fact that, at 33’ tall, it’s one of the largest paintings in Sweden, and when you’re viewing it, you’re standing in Hell.

Five Runners-Up

• Last Judgment, by Georg Rieder (Württemberg State Museum, Stuttgart, Germany, circa 1550)
• The Last Judgment, by the workshop of Anton Moller (Historical Museum of Gdansk, Gdansk, Poland, 1588)
• The Last Judgment (National Museum, Wrocław, Poland, circa 1583)
• The Last Judgement, by Raphael Coxcie (Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium, 1589)
• The Last Judgement (National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon, Portugal, 1549)

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