The Fall Of The Damned

Description

In the middle decades of the fifteenth century, Netherlandish panel painters were called on by churches and private patrons alike to render the fate of souls in vivid, unflinching terms. The Fall Of The Damned belongs to that tradition, a panel by Dirk Bouts that formed part of a larger scheme on the theme of divine judgement, likely a companion piece to a vision of paradise, meant to instruct as much as to move the viewer.

About Fall of the Damned

The composition falls into vertical bands of tumbling, contorted figures, pale bodies set against dark, rocky depths and passages of flame. Bouts organises the fall in stages: bodies twist near the top in postures of shock, while lower down the forms grow more compressed and distorted, drawn toward an unseen pit. The palette is restrained for a subject so dramatic, built from cool greys, ashen flesh tones, and pockets of dull red, which makes the occasional flash of colour carry real weight. Light falls unevenly across the scene, catching a raised arm or a twisted torso and leaving the rest in shadow, a device that gives the picture its unsettled, airless mood.

This period of the career of Bouts shows a painter working at the edge of the older Netherlandish tradition of tightly controlled line while absorbing a new interest in volume and spatial recession. The figures have weight and mass rather than the flattened elegance of earlier panel painting, and the rocky setting recedes with a sense of real depth. As a famous painting of the Northern Renaissance, it is studied today less for beauty than for the psychological force of its invention, the way despair is written into the angle of a neck or the clench of a hand.

ByMuseum artists recreate this panel as a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, working in oil on artist-grade canvas to match the greys and ash tones of the original and to preserve the texture of brushwork built up in layers. Every reproduction is painted by hand, not printed, so the surface carries the same variation and depth of a worked canvas, made individually rather than mechanically reproduced.

The hand-painted reproduction

A picture of this weight suits a reader of history, a collector drawn to the darker corners of Northern Renaissance painting, or a room set aside for serious, quiet looking rather than passing decoration. It rewards close study more than casual glance.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, made to order
• Available in multiple sizes
• Gallery-ready presentation
• Certificate of authenticity included
• Free worldwide shipping, with no shipping charge to any country