Hades in Chains, Shattered Doors in a Sea of Flames and Horrifying Faces of Hell: The Manifold Depiction of the Harrowing of Hell

The incomplete legend of Christ's Descent into Hell is primarily based on the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. Apocrypha are religious writings that were not included in the biblical canon. Nicodemus is described in the Gospel of John as a Pharisee who stands up for Jesus before the authorities and also attends the entombment. He was therefore a contemporary witness of Jesus and is said to have been the original author of this apocryphal gospel, which complements the extremely vague hints in the Bible regarding the whereabouts of Christ's soul between the crucifixion and resurrection. Thus the First Letter of Peter 3:18-19 simply states:

"For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison."

Since the Early Middle Ages, Christ's Descent into the Underworld has had a significant meaning for the salvific history. In the Byzantine Eastern Church, the Resurrection was associated with the Harrowing of Hell and the salvation of the righteous. The result was the Icon of the Anastasis, which is still a central image in Orthodox art today. It is the Easter and Resurrection image par excellence, as it bears dual witness to the redemptive work of Christ, who not only conquers his own death, but also redeems humanity from it – for the first time during his Descent into Hell. This fundamental pictorial solution probably originated in the Syrian-Palestinian region and was then spread throughout the Byzantine Empire.

In Western European Christian art, the association of hell with heat, fire and flames was established early on. It is therefore not surprising that in most Western depictions of Christ in Limbo, blazing flames flicker out of the underworld.
One iconographic variation actually presents hell as a mere sea of flames from which Christ rescues the souls of the righteous. In both the Gospel Harmony of Eusebius from Reichenau and the Echternach Pericopes of Henry III, several evil creatures are depicted shackled at the bottom of the picture, while Christ extends his redeeming hand to Adam.

In addition, the function of the beast's mouth as the gateway to hell is sometimes emphasized by allusions of architecture, for example in the Picture Bible of Saint Louis and the Très Belles Heures de Notre-Dame. In other images, such as the full-page miniaturess in the Liber Precum and the St. Alban’s Psalter, the broken doors lie before the Hellmouth and at the feet of Christ as a symbol of his powerful victory over Satan and Hades. This is further emphasized by the fact that Satan's contorted and bent body is pressed down by one of the doors.

Around the same time as the Hellmouth variant, the tradition of depicting the gates of hell as fortresses was also established in Western Europe. Artists invented dramatic scenes in which Christ frees the righteous from castle-like structures that either appear to be collapsing or whose doors have been lifted off their hinges and shattered.
In late medieval depictions such as Simon Bening's Stein Quadriptych or the miniature in the Herrenalb Prayer Book Satan or Hades cling to the remains of the infernal doors, making the evil creatures appear all the more helpless in the face of the radiant Christ.

However, the entrance to hell is often also located in the ground, which seems quite plausible given the idea of an underworld in contrast to heaven. For instance, the gates of hell could be an opening in the ground from which Christ has to pull Adam out, as in the historiated initial of the Fitzwilliam Book of Hours.

Finally, the depictions of Christ's Descent into Hell in the southern Italian exultet scrolls are particularly fascinating, combining Western and Eastern pictorial elements in a unique way. Exultet scrolls are used in the Latin liturgy during the Easter Vigil and contain the ceremonial doxology Exultet, which is usually illuminated with extraordinary splendor. As part of the Easter event, they usually illustrate Jesus' Descent into the Underworld.

While the flames in the miniatures presented here originate from the Western European pictorial tradition, the depiction of the defeated Hades on the ground in the Barberini Exultet Roll and the salvation of Adam and Eve from a minimalist sarcophagus in the Salerno Exultet Roll are clearly of Byzantine origin. In the Scroll Exultet and the Barberini Exultet Roll, the doors are truly shattered into all their components and thus emphasize the destructive power of Christ, which, however, is only directed against the powers of the netherworld.