In the Catholic ecclesiastical and cultural tradition, ideas about Paradise have developed and changed over the centuries. Their breadth and versatility are reflected in the works of the most prominent theologians, popular aspirations, Western European philosophy, literature and poetry, and, finally, in the outstanding monuments of religious art. The richness and diversity of the iconography of Paradise in Catholic art corresponds to the complexity and multiplicity of the doctrine of Paradise in Catholic doctrine.
The entire Christian concept of world history and human destiny is based on two fundamental concepts: the Fall and Redemption, Original Sin and the Divine Grace brought into the world by the God-man Jesus Christ. It is no coincidence that the two most important symbols of Christian art – the images of Adam and Eve under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and Christ on the Crucifixion Tree – reflect the entire content of Christianity.
The Catholic tradition has its roots in the New Testament doctrine of Paradise as the place of bliss in heaven – the shining throne of God’s glory, where believers enjoy eternal happiness and partake of the divine joy
The thirst for a “new” and “true” life, characteristic of early Christianity, was reflected in the writings of the Church Fathers and Teachers and was expressed in the aspiration to join the “kingdom of the living God,” to reach the “heavenly Jerusalem. It is no coincidence that Augustine concludes his work “On the City of God” with a chapter on “The Eternal Bliss of the City of God and the Eternal Sabbath,” where he treats Paradise as an eternally happy life of the righteous, in the “City of God” identified with the Church. The writings of St. Ephrem the Syrian laid the foundation for the later Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. He unified Paradise on Earth and Paradise in Heaven, the beginning and the end of the human drama, and divided it into three parts: the top, the sides, and the anteroom or pre-Paradise, where sinners in ignorance or involuntarily, as well as those who had not fully atoned for their sins, would dwell. The return to Paradise, lost because of the Fall, was the great hope of believers at the beginning of Christianity. The Western Church assimilated the teaching of St. Gregory of Nyssa that the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist in the Jordan River was the beginning of the return of Paradise lost to the forefathers, and that holiness and contemplative life were the way to find it.
Medieval ideas of Paradise as the heavenly Jerusalem where the eternal joy of the righteous reigns, contemplating God, and the world is filled with his glory are most clearly expressed in Dante’s Divine Comedy (1265-1321). The Paradise Rose of the Ninth Heaven is dedicated to the last three songs of the Divine Comedy. The poet has entered from the world of time into the world of eternity. At first Empyreus appears to his gaze as a fiery river, on the banks of which grow fiery flowers like rubies, but as he gets used to the glow, he sees heavenly spirits, the engines of the cosmos. The flowers are transformed into righteousness.
Later, during the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation, the Augustinian interpretation of Paradise was reinterpreted at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) as the “Triumph of the Catholic Church. The theme of “Triumph” was reflected in numerous works of Catholic art.
The image of Paradise in the Western Christian tradition was largely formed under the influence of Catholic art. The iconography of Paradise has evolved over the centuries, advancing one or another theme in accordance with the ideological tasks of the time. In the early Middle Ages, the dead were often depicted blissfully with their patron saints, especially Peter and Paul in the Garden of Heaven, which was indicated by trees, flowers, birds, and fruit. During the Middle Ages, images of progenitors for didactic purposes became popular. Adam was depicted as a man in general, abstractly, without a hint of gender, and was interpreted as a prototype of Christ. His companion Eve served as a prototype of the Virgin Mary, often called the “new Eve. The contradiction was that Eve was seen both as a type of the Virgin Mary and as the opposite, since she had brought sin into the world, which the Immaculate Virgin had atoned for through the sacrifice of her divine Son. The increasing veneration of the Virgin Mary also contributed to the multiplication of images of Eve, with whom she was constantly compared. Catholic art never unified the images of Adam and Eve and their images were created by the free imagination of artists. The multiplicity of depictions of these characters during the Renaissance is partly due to the possibility of depicting nudity without compromising the religious subject matter. In contrast to theology, in art the earthly Paradise and the heavenly Paradise are not separated. According to the original concept, Paradise is a garden of the type of the gardens of the oriental lords. Christianity made the place of the eastern monarchs’ pleasures the abode of the righteous. After a difficult struggle with persecutors and the temptations of the devil, they have found a place of rest. They no longer need clothing, for they are clothed in light, freed from earthly burdens, sickness, old age and death. Paradise was depicted by artists as an idyllic subject, greatly aided by the works of Lucas Cranach and Jan Breughel of Velvet. The Flemish painter Jan van Kessel (1626-1679) from the State Pushkin Museum collections has a painting of Paradise, a beautiful garden, inhabited by many animals and birds, known to science at the time, with the Tree of Life and the Serpent the Tempter in the center of the composition. Closely related to the theme of the Fall is the punishment by God of the guilty forefathers of mankind. The iconography of the scenes of Expulsion from Paradise, the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and the destruction of the Tower of Babel is linked to the concept of the Fall and Redemption. The iconography of the painting Noah’s Ark by Dutch painter Jacob Saverius I (1545-1602) from the collection of the State Pushkin Museum is descriptive as it appears: All the creatures of the earth and heaven (except the fish) gathered before the ark to immerse themselves in the ship, to be saved and to give birth to new life on earth, reflects a complex theological allegory which contains the idea of the coming salvation, the ark itself being a type of the tree of Crucifixion, the flood waters being a symbol of future Baptism, and the Flood itself being a type of the future Last Judgment. Over time, the central place in the iconography of Paradise took the image of the Last Judgment, in which the elect are placed on the right side of Christ the Judge, and sinners on his left. In all medieval depictions and even at the beginning of the Renaissance, the image of Paradise was supplemented by the image of Hell. The most famous depictions of this kind are the Byzantine-Venetian mosaics in the cathedral of Torcello in the 12th century, which represent in Italy the most complete type of the Last Judgment according to the Byzantine concept, a fresco by Giotto in the Capella degli Scroveni in Padua (c. 1305). Among the best depictions of the Last Judgment of the early Renaissance is a work by Fra Beato Angelico, preserved at the Monastery of San Marco in Florence (1430). Hell, in contrast to Paradise, is understood as a place of eternal torment. Christian hell is symbolized by the jaws of Leviathan. This image is taken from the Book of Job: “From his mouth flames come out, sparks of fire. Out of his nostrils comes smoke. As from a boiling pot or a cauldron.” Using this description, artists send condemned men into the monster’s mouth. Catholic iconography was heavily influenced by Dante’s Inferno from the Divine Comedy, which replaced Leviathan’s mouth with circles corresponding to various sins. Artists sought to diversify the punishments of hell according to the theological concept of the seven mortal circles. Purgatory, understood as a temporary Hell whose inhabitants experience the same torments as those condemned, the only difference being that these torments are not eternal and that the living can relieve them by prayer, almsgiving and mass, appeared only in the Counter-Reformation era Purgatory differs from Hell in the presence of anelas, which relieve souls deprived of the contemplation of God.
A true revolution in the iconography of the Last Judgment was Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel (1534-1541). Michelangelo depicted two parallel streams moving in opposite directions: the elect to salvation at the top of the grand scene and the sinners descending into hell at the bottom. The new placement of the figure of Christ adds a special dynamism to the entire image. Up to this point Christ had always been depicted seated in glory on a throne or on a rainbow. Michelangelo depicted him standing, more in the form of avenging God than a righteous judge, with a menacing gesture directed at sinners. His powerful, athletic figure is reminiscent not of the evangelical Christ, but of the mighty ancient God. He depicted angels without wings, saints without halos. He replaced the jaws of Leviathan with a boat of Charon. Paradoxically, the Last Judgment, painted for the papal chapel at the Vatican, turned out to be a triumph of paganism in Christian art. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment had a decisive impact on depictions of Heaven and the Last Judgment in Baroque art. Images of Heaven alone without scenes of the Last Judgment and Hell become rare. An example of such a rare depiction is Jacopo Tintoretto’s grandiose Paradise, painted by him in 1588-90 for the Great Council Hall in the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Tintoretto placed a great many figures in concentric circles, probably inspired by the circles of Dante’s Hell, and depicted the eternal bliss of the righteous after the Last Judgment. Thus, after Michelangelo and Tintoretto, the traditional iconography of Paradise, accepted in both Byzantium and the Medieval West and consisting of parallel registers, underwent radical changes. Following the tradition of Tintoretto, the unknown author of the 17th-century painting The Fall and Redemption (Paradise) from the collection of the State Museum of Fine Arts suggested a new iconographic version of Paradise. The painting is a vivid example of counter-Reformation art. The main thing in the interpretation of Paradise is the triumph of the Catholic Church, symbolized by the saints in heaven around the divine Trinity. Obviously, the artist, following Tintoretto, used the description of Paradise in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which describes a choir of saints arranged around the paradisiacal Rose of Empyrea. The artist depicted it as a golden cloud in which the figures of winged angels are discernible as petals (according to Dante). In the center of the Rose is depicted the Divine Trinity, worshipped by the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. On the clouds in concentric circles behind them are the apostles Peter and Paul and the Evangelists, then the apostles and martyrs, among whom is St. Catherine of Alexandria.
On the clouds in concentric circles behind them are the apostles Peter and Paul and the Evangelists, then the apostles and martyrs, among whom is St. Catherine of Alexandria. At the foot of the Holy Trinity in the center are the founders of the mendicant monastic orders, St. Francis, St. Dominic and St. Peter the Martyr, to their right are the bishops and church fathers. The lower row of clouds is filled with the most revered Catholic saints, St. Lawrence, St. Sebastian, St. Bartholomew and others. To the left and right of the saints are Adam with a palm branch and Eve, saved by the atoning sacrifice of Christ and the forefathers brought out of Hell. At the bottom of the picture is the earthly Paradise and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from it.
The iconography of Paradise, proposed by Michelangelo and Tintoretto and established in Catholic art after the Council of Trent in the Baroque period, is triumphalistic and solemn, but has little to do with the biblical texts.