Attributed to Giulio Parigi

This impressive drawing depicts the gaping jaws of a bestial monster—the anthropomorphized portal into hell, where demons and fantastical creatures cavort among the flames. A popular iconography during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the hell mouth was a regular feature on the stage, especially in dramatizations of Christian narratives like the Harrowing of Hell and the Last Judgment. This seventeenth-century set, however, probably accompanied one of the increasingly popular stagings of mythological narratives in which a protagonist descended into the underworld. The visual language of this apocalyptic inferno recalls the stage designs of Giulio Parigi, an influential festival designer at the Medici court in Florence.