The Fall of the Damned

The Fall of the Damned is a large oil on panel painting by Peter Paul Rubens, made around 1620 to 1621 and held in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. It shows a mass of damned souls hurled into the abyss by the archangel Michael and his attendant angels, their tangled bodies lit by strong contrasts of light and dark beneath a source of heavenly light above. A preparatory sketch in black and red chalk with grey wash survives in the British Museum, likely begun by a studio assistant before Rubens reworked it in brush and oil color. In 1959 the painting was vandalized when an attacker threw acid on it, an act the vandal justified as relieving him of the work of destruction. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/