Last Judgement: Saint Michael
Colijn de Coter·1507
Historical Context
Last Judgement: Saint Michael by Colijn de Coter, dated 1507 and housed in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, depicts the archangel Michael performing his eschatological role as the weigher of souls at the Last Judgment — a subject that combined terror and hope in roughly equal measure for medieval and Renaissance viewers. Michael, armed and armored, holds the scales in which individual souls' merits were weighed against their sins, with the outcome determining their eternal destiny. De Coter was one of the leading Flemish painters of the early 16th century working in Brussels, and his panel reflects the continued vitality of the Flemish devotional tradition in the generation after Memling.
Technical Analysis
De Coter renders Michael's armor with the metallic sheen and careful light reflection characteristic of Flemish painters trained in the van Eyck tradition. The scales are depicted as a real physical object with weight and balance, not merely a symbolic attribute. The treatment of the wings — combining blue, red, and feather-detail passages — is among the most technically ambitious elements of the composition.
