Christian liturgy and ritual underpinned the practice and ideals of holy war and especially the Crusades (11th–16th centuries) in the medieval Christian imagination. As the mechanism of connecting the salvific and eschatological to the secular events of war and warfare, the liturgy – in the form of knightly blessings, votive masses for war, and penitential processions – articulated and sacralized the ideology of holy war throughout the period.

Alternative cities structure Augustine’s City of God. The divide between the earthly and the heavenly city returns in his two Romes, a violent city of civil war and a violent city of virtue, in his two Jerusalems, a violent city of civil war and a city prefiguring God’s city, and even among Christians, divided between love of self and love of God. Although the heavenly city’s full realization is deferred to after the end of history, in this life, the heavenly city exists, mixed with the earthly city, on a pilgrimage toward realization. Rome, a dark shadow (umbra) that sets the light of the divine city in relief, instantiates the earthly city’s violence in both its horrific and virtuous manifestations. In its better form, Jerusalem advances toward the heavenly city’s realization as the prefiguration (figura) of what the divine city will realize (implementum).

Focusing on select examples of monumental art and manuscript illumination, this chapter examines key iconographic themes, visual strategies, and changes in artistic representations of heaven and hell in the Romanesque and gothic periods.In particular, it investigates how medieval artists and their patrons drew variously on scripture, theology, and exegesis to craft images of the afterlife that functioned complexly within the specific historical, cultural, and social contexts in which they were created.Emphasis also lies on the ways that these visual representations of heaven and hell, though often rooted in textual sources, constituted a distinct form of speculation on the afterlife.Seen both individually and together, the works discussed here reveal the central and enduring contribution of art in shaping medieval conceptions of the hereafter.