There is a wretch, twined round with fiends, gazing straight before him as he sinks; one half of his face is buried in his hand, the other fixed in a stony spasm of despair, foreshadowing perpetuity of hell.

Nothing could express with sublimity of a higher order the sense of irremediable loss, eternal pain, a future endless without hope, than the rigid dignity of this not ignoble sinner's dread.

Just below is the place to which the doomed are sinking.

Michelangelo reverted to Dante for the symbolism chosen to portray hell.

Charon, the demon, with eyes of burning coal, compels a crowd of spirits in his ferryboat.