Hell in the Byzantine World: Volume 1, Essays A History of Art and Religion in Venetian Crete and the Eastern Mediterranean

The imagery of Hell, the Christian account of the permanent destinations of the human soul after death, has fascinated people over the centuries since the emergence of the Christian faith. These landmark volumes provide the first large-scale investigation of this imagery found across the Byzantine and post-Byzantine world. Particular emphasis is placed on images from churches across Venetian Crete, which are comprehensively collected and published for the first time. Crete was at the centre of artistic production in the late Byzantine world and beyond and its imagery was highly influential on traditions in other regions. The Cretan examples accompany rich comparative material from the wider Mediterranean ? Cappadocia, Macedonia, the Peloponnese and Cyprus. The large amount of data presented in this publication highlight Hell's emergence in monumental painting not as a concrete array of images, but as a diversified mirroring of social perceptions of sin.

Introduction Angeliki Lymberopoulou and Eirini Panou; Part I: Crete; 1. From Crete to Hell: The Textual Tradition on Punishments in the Afterlife and the Writings of Joseph Bryennios on Crete Dionysios Stathakopoulos; 2. Venetian Crete: The Historical Context Charalambos Gasparis; 3. Hell on Crete Angeliki Lymberopoulou; 4. Hell from West to East: Western Resonances in Cretan Wall Painting Rembrandt Duits; Part II: Eastern Mediterranean; 5. 'When the visual order was established': The Last Judgement and Punishments in Hell in Byzantine Cappadocia Rainer Warland ; 6. Damned in Hell, damned in the Church: Imagery and Space in Byzantium Athanasios Semoglou; 7. Images of Hell and the Afterlife in the Churches of Laconia Sharon Gerstel and Panayiotis S. Katsafados; 8. Hell in the Sweet Land: Hell's Place in the Last Judgements of Byzantine and Medieval Cyprus Annemarie Weyl Carr.

ANGELIKI LYMBEROPOULOU is Senior Lecturer in Art History at The Open University. She is the editor, with Rembrandt Duits, of Byzantine Art and Renaissance Europe (2013) and of Cross-Cultural Interaction between Byzantium and the West 1204-1669. Whose Mediterranean is it Anyway? (2018).