The Hanging of Judas in Chicago and the End of an Image

Abstract

A single small late medieval glass panel, measuring 22 by 17 inches, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago depicts the grisly final moments of Judas Iscariot (fig. 1). In the central foreground, Judas’s limp body hangs from the lowest branch of a large tree. Bearded and with reddish-brown hair, his head tilts to the left, exposing the noose that coils around his throat. In the lower left, a winged demon gratefully accepts Judas’s soul, symbolized by a naked infant, as it bursts through his stomach and rends his flesh apart. It is as though an inverted birth, where death begets death, the demon acting asmidwife. The terrible event occurs