In lieu of Satan, the Hell scene in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment features Charon and Minos, two key figures present in Dante’s Inferno. These figures were given an interesting psychological interpretation in the well circulated fifteenth-century commentary on Dante’s Commedia by Cristoforo Landino. This article compares Landino’s allegoresis of the two figures and a selection of Michelangelo’s poetry, as well as the artist’s drawings for and relationship to the young nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, to suggest the hypothesis that Michelangelo’s Minos and Charon were intended to symbolize the psychological experience of damnation and, more specifically, the dynamic interplay of conscience, free will, choice and volition.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Rolfe, S. M., (2025), "Michelangelo Reading Landino? The "Devil" in Michelangelo's Last Judgment", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Rolfe, Sarah Melanie. "Michelangelo Reading Landino? The "Devil" in Michelangelo's Last Judgment." Quaderni d'italianistica 30 (2): 2010. 19-38. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v30i2.11901. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.