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Abstract

This chapter offers a new interpretation of Rubens’s most intriguing eschatological work, the large painting of the Fall of the Damned of about 1621, now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. While the seven-headed dragon and the mass of human bodies falling toward a bottomless hell refer to the final verses of the Book of Revelation, the fiery cataclysm engages with the vivid description of the elemental meltdown at the end of times described in the Second Epistle of Peter. It will be shown that 2 Peter 3:10–13, a biblical source that has not previously been associated with Rubens’s painting, acquired new topicality in the debates about the nature of the heavens that had become even more relevant with the astronomical discoveries of the 1610s. Focusing on the moment when time and space dissolve into eternity, Rubens created a powerful apocalyptic narrative that responded to the eschatological anxieties of his time and a general awareness that the world had grown old. Moreover, Rubens’s eschatological painting shared in the sense, common in the early modern period, that cosmological and eschatological imaginaries of world transformation and historical space-time relations were closely interrelated. The heavenly phenomena that telescopes had now made visible to the human eye could be understood both as supernatural spectacles staged by God and as indications that the old Aristotelian world order could no longer be upheld.

In: The Eschatological Imagination
Space, Time, and Experience (1300–1800)
How did the early-modern Christian West conceive of the spaces and times of the afterlife? The answer to this question is not obvious for a period that saw profound changes in theology, when the telescope revealed the heavens to be as changeable and imperfect as the earth, and when archaeological and geological investigations made the earth and what lies beneath it another privileged site for the acquisition of new knowledge.
With its focus on the eschatological imagination at a time of transformation in cosmology, this volume opens up new ways of studying early-modern religious ideas, representations, and practices. The individual chapters explore a wealth of – at times little-known – visual and textual sources. Together they highlight how closely concepts and imaginaries of the hereafter were intertwined with the realities of the here and now.

Contributors: Matteo Al Kalak, Monica Azzolini, Wietse de Boer, Christine Göttler, Luke Holloway, Martha McGill, Walter S. Melion, Mia M. Mochizuki, Laurent Paya, Raphaèle Preisinger, Aviva Rothman, Minou Schraven, Anna-Claire Stinebring, Jane Tylus, and Antoinina Bevan Zlatar.
In: The Eschatological Imagination