Medieval painters depicted Muslims and Jews torturing souls in hell

Evidence

The dark regions of hell also contained monsters identified as Jewish, Muslim, and African, featured in medieval paintings torturing humans. Hell represented the artistic antithesis to “the calm aesthetic numbness of heaven.” We find many more paintings of hell because heaven was, in the aesthetic sense, boring. Hell was seen as an imminent danger, a misstep away from the village or city if one was foolish. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 114

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘There are more paintings of hell than heaven because heaven was boring’ — a compact, tweetable line.
• XREF: Direct evidence that Muslims were placed inside hell iconography alongside demons, tying the art tradition to the reader’s theology-and-art manufacturing thesis.