Palma Giovane tried to cover the entrance wall of the Sala dello Scrutinio of the Doge’s Palace with an emulation of Tintoretto, but the main renown of his _Last Judgment_ seems to rest on his humorous idea of putting his wife both into Heaven and Hell. The use of Hell to pay off private scores is not unique with Palma, and of course everybody can plead the precedent of Dante.
In another Venetian Paradise—that of Jacobello del Fiore—the symmetrical groups of haloed saints in blue and red and gold recall exactly the groups in the La Scala ballet. The Paradise in Botticelli’s _Assumption of the Virgin_ in the National Gallery is also somewhat geometric, though the empty lilied court below gives beautiful relief. Fra Bartolommeo’s large faded fresco of _The Last Judgment_, in Florence, with its sworded archangel to greet the poor souls as they rise from their graves, is inspired by the Pisan fresco, and is less interesting than that of Fra Angelico, his fellow Dominican at San Marco, in whom we breathe a serener, clearer air, though his sweetness and finish accentuate again the intellectual _naïveté_. His series of little panels in the Accademia of Florence has a quaint originality, the Judge sitting over a mystic red and green wheel, with the blessed on either hand. Angels welcome newcomers or lament over the rejected, while demons poke spears into the damned. More conventional in composition is his large easel-picture in the same room—a miracle of detailed loveliness, except for the Hell, which is botched, as though unsuited to his artistic temperament. Indeed we know he made his devil hideous out of sheer dislike of the theme. The sheep are divided from the goats by a curious row of open graves resembling sky-lights. The Judge is superdominant, angels and babes hovering round him, the trumpeting angels at his feet. In the Paradise of flowers walk the saints in couples and companies; the sinners—in crowns, mitres, or mere caps—are driven Hellward at the points of a pitchfork into their respective circles, where some are eaten of the horrible horned Satan, some are eating one another, and others are gnawing their own bloody hands. There are sinners seething in pots, sinners starving at a laden table, sinners hung up, sinners holding their own heads in their hands. Demons like brown bears gnash white teeth, and in the north-north-east corner of Hell a capacious big-toothed gullet—horrible in its suggestion of more behind—is gulping down two red-headed wretches. In his _Christ in Hades_ the gentle painter, following an apocryphal gospel, incarnates Hell in a demon crushed beneath its door.