Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: German
15th-century
Urbana, IL: Spurlock Museum
47%
The Harrowing of Hell. 15th century. Wood and paint
Better-preserved pigmentation might have been to this object's benefit (at least in terms of my experience of it as a work of art). Even if it were in ship-shape, though, I struggle to imagine it being much more than a cut-rate instance of medieval wood sculpture. The best works in this idiom are less stout than this one is, their figures a bit freer in their movements and not as determined by the total mass of the object. This carving's density is to its aesthetic detriment. Like, the spot where Christ grabs the sinner's wrist to yank him up from Hell ought to have been a point of differentiation from the object's prevailing order of thick forms and elisions, a real agon set apart structurally from the rest of the action. But there's not enough distinctness given to this critical moment: it blends back into the crowding of the triple-stacked figures as if Christ is being pulled into Hell, not pulling prehistory's sinners out. (2025)