The Hell at Taula de Sant Miguel

Abstract

The Christian Hell, destiny of the damned after the Last Judgment, had several functions in the Middle Ages, but for centuries there was no consensus about its forms. From the 13th century, with the production and liturgical use of standardized images, visual representations of Hell became more frequent, and consequently, a more cohesive mental image of its space emerged. From a theoretical and methodological discussion based on the New Cultural History, we will analyze one of the infernal images of that period contained within the Taula de Sant Miquel, with the objective of verifying if the infernal geography in the iconography was already established. From the understanding of the relationship between what is exposed (representative) and its meaning (represented). But without considering the sign or the signifier as a support for the meaning, as if it had no importance. In our approach, on the contrary, the signifier and the signified are both important in the interpretive process.