ABSTRACT
"The Vision of the Last Judgment" has an ill-starred history. As for "The Vision of the Last Judgment," critics seem to consider James Barry's Society of Arts murals not a direct influence so much as an inspiring general model of achievement. Specifically, "The Vision of the Last Judgment" is indebted to the culminating work in Barry's series; titled "Elysium and Tartarus or the State of Final Retribution" "The Vision of the Last Judgment" locates Barry's intellectual Afterlife within the human brain. It is a picture of the mind consisting of a series of schematic cross-sections based on brain anatomy. "The Vision of the Last Judgment" is anything but a direct, point-for-point allegory of the physical brain. "The Vision of the Last Judgment" associates several neuro-metaphysical correlatives with respectively, four, three, and two-dimensional vision, while "Single vision & Newtons sleep" is identified with Satan, Reason, and the pure abstraction of mathematical lines and points.
