‘Hell’ The painting signed 1601 by Jan Breughel the Elder, 1568-1625, (image downloaded from Artvee, which would not have been possible in 1601) is formed of oil paint on copper and shows humans in Hell, a Christian construct. In Medieval times Antwerp was a major trade market with copper from (now) eastern Europe so not hard for JB to get a sheet of copper. This scene of Hell mixes classical mythology and monsters and demons and various other contexts relevant of the time, but the title is clear, the humans are in Hell.
Switch forward a mere 425 or so years, what would a similar picture of Hell be today? Well, it could be a scene of millions of humans attached to a hardware device which needs electricity to power it (and the resources for which are running out on the Earth surface), either a relatively big one of a laptop or a desktop computer, or a tiny one of a very smart phone, with hundreds of demons sitting in the inbox, the draft box, the sent box, 1000s of what were once known as photos and 36 was the maximum you could get (if all came out okay), and random images and things flashing up on the screen, all designed to take the human further into the abyss of Hell, and further taking the natural world down into the abyss of destruction (of which the human is also a part factually).
Winter weeks of 2025, the human in 2025 faces the onerus task of ‘catching up on emails’, most of which are now lost in the 100s gone by, and how to unpick which are relevant and which not, which of the 1000s of pics is the one it is looking for, the temptation of the free email providers unable to be faced and to get itself a private email address because a few pounds a month seems like pure robbery yet the mountain of digital tech things now streaming through a hardware device, how on Earth would Jan Breughel the Elder even begin to paint this hideous scene?
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