«Albergo eterno d’anime infelici»: visioni e immagini dell’inferno barocco

Abstract

As Piero Camporesi had shown in La casa dell’eternità (Garzanti, 1987) during the Counter-Reformation the idea of hell changed radically: it is no longer that orderly, hierarchical structure with sloping floors that Dante had imagined in his masterpiece, but a perpetually dark place, both fiery and frozen, where souls crowd one another without any regular arrangement. However, this indistinct mass stimulates the imagination of the preachers, who create corrupt pictures of atrocious suffering and, pushing the word into the territories usually reserved for the image, try to describe hell as a stunning setting of flames, monsters and atrocities. Image and word come together completely in La prigione dell’inferno, a small treaty by the Modenese Jesuit Giovan Battista Manni who represents, with his fantastically truculent engravings and subsequent explanations, the most pertinent example of the need to mobilize, in addition to words, also sight, to instill in the faithful the fear of sin.