The two pillars supporting the arch are so carved as to represent figures
of the damned going down into hell. The artist might have been inspired by
Dante had he not lived before the poet who collected and fixed upon the
sombre canvas of his verse all the woeful visions of eternal punishment
that haunted the mediaeval mind. A man and woman are descending to the
abyss, he holding her by the hair, and she clasping him by the waist, the
faces of both terribly expressive of horror that is new, and utter despair.
The meaning is plain, enough: each was the cause of the other's doom, and
the sentence of the Judge in the panel above has united them in hell for
all eternity. On the opposite pillar are another couple, also clasping one
another; but their faces express the blank and passionless misery of a
doom foreknown. Monk or layman, he who designed the composition felt the
necessity of giving this tragic warning to his fellow-beings. Centuries
later an English poet expressed the same idea in verse:
'The woman's cause is man's! they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or god-like, bond or free.'
One of the less conspicuous figures is going down head foremost in the
company of an animal that looks very like a pig.
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