Hell Is for White People.
"A painting from 1515 turns a mirror on its viewers" in Cabinet Magazine by
Alexander Nagel.
Nagel's commentary is well worth the 5 minutes necessary to read it. Here is how describes Nagels' commentary on Metafilter :
" There had been paintings of hell before, showing people (much like the
people for whom the paintings were made) undergoing various punishments
for their sins. But this painting no longer represents generic humanity. Here, the tortured are marked as white Europeans, being punished by
mostly swarthy monsters with distinctly exotic trappings drawn from the
newly encountered inhabitants of the farthest ends of the world—all the
way down the African coast, all the way across the (Atlantic) Western
Ocean, and, possibly, as far as India. And the punishments seem to
concentrate on the sins unleashed by the European expeditions, the sins
of rapaciousness: lust, gluttony, and greed. "
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