Hella good: a detail from the Chapmans' Hell. Photograph: Andy Butterton/PA
The Pope's inquiry at a sermon on Sunday as to why we don't talk about hell any more set us on the arts blog thinking. Which are the best artistic representations of hell? For me, it would be hard to beat the sermon in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for sheer oppressive horror. The coup de grace is the image of eternity - a bird taking away a mountain of sound one grain at a time, and by the time it's finished "Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended." You can read the whole thing here.
Then there's the magnificent 1999 film South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, which features several scenes in hell. The great Disney song parody Up There, sung by Satan, doesn't seem to be on YouTube, but here's Kenny descending into the fiery pit. Other formidable depictions include Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel where the souls of humanity rise and descend to their fates, the Chapman Brothers' Hell (itself destroyed in the famous Momart fire), Claudio's speech in Measure for Measure and indeed the chaos dimension in the uncut version of Event Horizon.
