Experiencing the Last Judgement opens up new ways of understanding a Byzantine image type that has hitherto been considered largely uniform in its manifestations and to a great extent frightening, coercive and paralysing. It moves beyond a purely didactic understanding of the Byzantine image of the Last Judgement, as a visual eschatological text to be ‘read’ and learned from, and proposes instead an appreciation of each unique image as a dynamic site to be experienced. Paintings, icons and mosaics from the tenth to the fourteenth century, from inside and outside of the Byzantine Empire, are placed within their specific socio-historical milieus, their immediate decorative programmes and their architectural contexts to demonstrate that each unique image constituted a carefully orchestrated and immersive experience of judgement. Each case study outlines the differences that exist in reality between these images that are often subsumed under one iconographic label, making a case against condensing dynamic, lived images into apparently static pictorial ‘types’. Images of the Last Judgement needed the body, mind and memory of the viewer for the creation of meaning, and so the experience of these images was unavoidably spatial, gendered, corporeal, mnemonic, emotional, rhetorical and most often liturgical. Unpacking Byzantine images of judgement in light of these various facets of experience for the first time helps to elucidate the interaction of past individuals with the image, and the ways in which such encounters were intended to benefit the communities that made and lived alongside them.

‘The Last Judgment is one of the most versatile images in Byzantine iconography. Its diverse sources constitute a pastiche of biblical references, hagiographical accounts, and texts of apocalyptic nature, to be found in both Christian dogma and widespread popular attitudes and beliefs … Niamh Bhalla undertook and accomplished, with notable success, a particularly difficult task; her monograph constitutes the first, at least to my knowledge, comprehensive in-depth study of the function, power and agency of the Last Judgement imagery in Byzantium on various levels, emotional, mnemonic, gendered, socio-historical, didactic and rhetorical, as an immersive personal and shared experience that informs the identities of the individuals and the communities to which it is addressed. In this light, it constitutes an excellent contribution to the field and a landmark publication on the topic’ - Byzantinische Zeitschrift Bd. 115/3, 2022.

Niamh Bhalla is Course Leader and Lecturer in Art History at New College of the Humanities, Northeastern University in London. She completed her PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK, and has previously lectured and worked on research projects at The Courtauld and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her research focuses on the social agency of late-classical and Byzantine imagery. She explores themes such as space, memory, the body, gender and rhetoric in relation to the experience of visual imagery.