Paradise on Earth

From scriptures and liturgical texts the concept of paradise emerges as a dominant image in the religious art of Christianity and Islam over the centuries and eventually develops what we might term quasi-secular cognates as well, in which theological paradise in effect loans part of its meaning to secular palaces, poetry, and visual arts. In the Christian tradition, images of an essentially scriptural paradise figure prominently in literature of the West. These range from the Neoplatonic vision of a multi-tiered heaven in the early-sixth-century Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite through the paradise described by the ninth-century Beatus of Liebana in his Commentaries on the Apocalypse to the lofty poetic visions of Dante's Divine Comedy in the early fourteenth century and Milton's Paradise Lost in the seventeenth, finding echoes in the earthy twentieth-century representations of Roark Bradford and Marc Connelly, epitomized in the latter's The Green Pastures.

These scriptural, liturgical, and literary images of paradise in turn had a profound influence on music and the visual arts, starting with illustrations to the texts in question. The medieval sculptural reliefs of the Last Judgment that so often grace the doorways of eleventh-and twelfth-century Romanesque churches traditionally depicted the rewards of paradise on the left (to the right of a central figure of Christ) and the torments of hell to the right or below, with details taken from Revelation and from the Beatus manuscripts. From Dante's late medieval exegesis and expansion of biblical texts came a view of paradise that was to influence later generations of visual artists. From Genesis combined with Milton's poetic text came Franz Joseph Haydn's musical depiction of paradise in The Creation as well as a number of depictions in painting.

Court of the Lions in Casa Real Palace, Alhambra, Granada, Spain. The concept of paradise on earth developed partly through physical representation in gardens, palace courtyards, or the cloisters of medieval monasteries. © PATRICK WARD/CORBIS

The image of paradise on Earth in the Western tradition is not exclusively Christian in inspiration. An idyllic earthly paradise is also evoked in the rich tradition of poetry and art inspired by the Greek myths of Arcadia and given defining shape in the poetry of Virgil. The classical Arcadia is a land of shepherds and idyllic peace that returns again and again in the poetry, prose, and painting of the West, given perhaps its most characteristic form in the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin in seventeenth-century France.

In Western art of the Christian tradition, where the illustration of religious texts is encouraged rather than actively discouraged as in Judaism and Islam, depictions of paradise are as likely to recall the primal innocence of Eden as they are the reward awaiting Christians in the afterlife. Seen from a strictly narrative perspective, the artistic potential of Christian hell is rich in pictorial possibilities, full of emotion and activity, while that of heaven or paradise is, comparatively speaking, both formulaic and limited, with the exception of the high drama of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. The Western art tradition does not, however, possess the embedded cultural tradition of the walled garden, and so, to paraphrase Freud, in Western art a flower is often simply a flower.

Among the many depictions of paradise in Western art, two may serve to illustrate the gamut of imagery. In the famous Ghent altarpiece painted by the Van Eyck brothers between 1425 and 1432, a literal depiction of paradise in the lower central panel of the open altarpiece shows a green meadow populated by crowds of angels, apostles, clerics, martyrs, and other saints, adoring the Holy Lamb on a stone altar, while an octagonal basin in the foreground, recalling the baptismal font with its water of salvation, contains a playing fountain of life. The inspiration for the imagery comes in part from Revelation and probably in part from the liturgy of All Saints, and the imagery itself is Roman Catholic in conception and detail. By contrast, the various depictions of the Peaceable Kingdom by the American naive painter Edward Hicks recall the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah 11:6, the peaceable kingdom that will arrive on earth with the coming of the Messiah: "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them."

Explicit physical recreations of paradise in Western landscape architecture are rare. The enclosed cloisters of medieval monasteries sometimes carried such an association, and the forecourts or enclosed gardenlike settings for some churches, referred to as parvises, carry the same connotation.