Stand in the nave of St Thomas’s church in Salisbury and look east, toward the altar. Over the chancel arch, filling the wall to the roof, Christ sits on a rainbow above his apostles, and on the left the dead climb out of their graves toward a city of towers. On the right, demons drag a chained crowd into the open jaws of a red dragon, a bishop’s mitre and two crowns among them, and a scroll underneath reads Nulla est redemptio. A painter whose name is lost put it there around 1470, and in 1593 it went under whitewash for almost three hundred years.
That kind of painting has a name, a doom, the same word id Software put on a game in 1993. Here is what a doom painting shows, how the English covered theirs up and found them again, and how id’s hell, built from heavy metal and horror films, ended up in 2025 with a medieval war against hell of its own.
What is a doom painting?
A doom is the English name for a painting of the Last Judgement on the wall of a medieval church, the moment at the end of time when Christ judges every soul and sends it to heaven or to hell. The word is Old English, dōm, a law or a judgement, and its darker sense came from doomsday itself.
The usual place for one was over the chancel arch, between the nave, where the parish gathered, and the chancel, where the priest said mass. Anyone facing the altar faced the doom. Christ sits at the top, often on a rainbow and showing his wounds. Heaven is on his right hand, your left as you look at it, and hell on his left, because that’s how Matthew tells it.
“And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. […] Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels”
Matthew 25:33, 41, King James Version
Between the two sides the same cast turns up: the dead rising naked from their graves, St Michael weighing souls, St Peter at the gate. And on the hell side there is almost always the hell-mouth, painted as the open jaws of a sea monster, Leviathan from the Book of Job: “out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.”
Salisbury’s is the one to learn on, the largest and best preserved doom left in England.
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The arch
The whole wall over the chancel arch, painted around 1470 by an English painter whose name is lost, so the judgement hangs over the way to the altar.
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The judge
Christ on a rainbow, his feet on a smaller one, both hands raised. Below him the twelve apostles sit in a row, judging the twelve tribes of Israel, as Matthew 19 promises.
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The Virgin pleads
Mary kneels at his right hand. The church’s own guide names the figure on his other side John the Baptist.
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The New Jerusalem
Behind them, the heavenly city, all towers and gates, with the faithful crowding its walls.
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The dead rise
Angels blow trumpets and the dead climb out of their graves, some still in their shrouds. Most are naked but for a few hats, a bishop’s mitre, a labourer’s hat and a crown, and the angels lead them up.
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The Prince of Darkness
A beast’s head and a beast’s feet, and one bird-like foot steps off the painting onto the bare stone of the arch. The only sinner still dressed, a woman in a wimple, is handing him a drink.
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The hell-mouth
Demons drag the damned in a chain into the mouth of a fiery dragon. Find the bishop’s mitre and the two crowns in the line. Rank gets nobody out of it.
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Nulla est redemptio
The words on the scroll at the bottom of hell. The church translates them “There is no escape for the wicked.”
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St Osmund
Low on the right of the arch stands St Osmund, made a saint in 1457, and on the left St James of Compostela, patron of pilgrims.
The judge is up under the roof, but the warnings sit low in the corners by the arch, closest to the people’s eyes, and the devil’s foot comes right off the paint toward them, a threat kept in front of the parish every time they looked up from their prayers.
Whitewashed: what happened to the doom paintings at the Reformation
Most of England’s dooms were destroyed at the Reformation. Edward VI’s injunctions of 1547 set off a wave of image-breaking, church walls were whitewashed and covered with Bible texts, and Elizabeth’s injunctions of 1559 told the clergy to destroy “pictures, paintings, and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition, so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glass windows, or elsewhere.”
Lime covers paint without scraping it off, so a lot of it waited.
At Salisbury the doom went under in 1593, with Queen Elizabeth’s coat of arms hung on top. In 1819 cleaning turned up faint colour, and then, in the church’s own history, “for some extraordinary reason it was covered with whitewash again.” It was uncovered for good in 1881, and in 2019 three conservators spent three months feeding lime back behind the loose paint.
Wenhaston, in Suffolk, got its doom back by accident. Its judgement is painted on oak boards that filled the top of the chancel arch around 1500, with the rood, a carved Christ on the cross, nailed right onto it. In the 1540s the rood was torn off and the boards whitewashed, and under Elizabeth the royal arms were painted where it had been. In 1892, while the church was being rebuilt, the boards were taken down in pieces and left in the churchyard.
“That night, it rained. The whitewash, applied centuries before, dissolved. When the workmen arrived on site the following day, they saw wonderful things.”
Simon Knott, Suffolk Churches
Move the slider through five hundred years.
The rain showed parts of the Virgin Mary and St John the Baptist, and that December the painting went on show at the Society of Antiquaries in London. The rood’s outlines are still on it in bare wood, nail holes and all. Simon Knott calls them “ghosts of lost Catholic England.”
Coventry’s took far longer. Holy Trinity’s doom, painted in the 1430s, was found under limewash in 1831, restored and varnished, and darkened again by 1855. The church calls 2004, after nine years of conservation, the year it was “finally revealed.”
Memling’s Last Judgement and the painters’ hells
Painters with rich patrons made the same scene on panels, and one was captured at sea. Hans Memling painted his Last Judgement in Bruges between 1467 and 1473 for Angelo Tani of the Medici bank. In 1473 the galleon carrying it to Florence, the San Matteo, was taken by Gdańsk privateers, and it’s in the city’s National Museum now.
The layout is Salisbury’s, with a bigger budget. Parish painters worked mostly in earth colours, and the best blue cost more than gold leaf; Memling, painting for a banker, has gold armour, a gold sky behind Christ and blue in the robes around him. A lily for mercy sits on one side of Christ’s head and a red-hot sword for justice on the other. On the left St Peter leads the saved up a crystal staircase, and on the right the damned fall into the fire. Put the light on each.
The scales are the drama. Memling’s Michael holds them in one hand, and with the other he jabs the end of his staff into a damned soul, as if to hurry him on toward hell.
Bosch took the judge away. The hell wing of his Garden of Earthly Delights, around 1490 to 1500, is a city burning at night with no scales and no gate, only the punishment (more in The Garden of Earthly Delights, explained and the paintings inside Elden Ring).
John Martin’s Pandemonium: hell as a city
By 1841 hell had become architecture. John Martin showed Pandemonium at the Royal Academy that year, Milton’s palace of the fallen angels rising out of a lake of fire, with Satan on a rock in the foreground. It hangs in the Louvre, in the frame of serpents and dragons Martin designed for it.
“Anon out of the earth a fabric huge / Rose like an exhalation, with the sound / Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet”
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I
Milton’s hell goes up to sweet music.
More than half the canvas is a brown so dark it reads as black, and the bright orange of the lava is barely a sliver of it, with no blue or green at all. When id’s artists painted the hell of the 2016 DOOM, one of them, Ryan Watkins, summed up the palette in a line: “The color palette was based on the classic Hell theme of fire and brimstone.” Martin’s other ends of the world are in The sublime in art.
Where did the name DOOM come from?
id Software released DOOM on December 10, 1993, and its name came out of a pool hall. In David Kushner’s Masters of Doom, the title is John Carmack’s idea, taken from Martin Scorsese’s 1986 film The Color of Money, where Tom Cruise walks into a billiards hall carrying his cue in a black case.
“What you got in there?” another player asks. […] “In here?” Cruise replies, flipping open the case. “Doom.”
David Kushner, Masters of Doom, 2003
Carmack told it himself in 1999: “That, and the resulting carnage, was how I viewed us springing the game on the industry.” In Kushner, the team agrees on what the game should feel like, “a cross between Evil Dead II and Aliens, horror and hell, blood and science.”
DOOM Eternal’s hell, in its makers’ words
id rebuilt DOOM in 2016, and its creative director, Hugo Martin, told Game Informer where the new hell came from.
“Rock ’n’ roll was our inspiration for everything. There is a lot of heavy metal in our hell, and that is intentional. When you look at the original Doom, we always said it looks like the kind of stuff a 15-year-old would draw on the back of his notebook during math class.”
Hugo Martin, Game Informer, January 2016
On Bethesda’s art pages that June he named the look outright: “Heavy Metal album covers of the ’80s were a big influence on the visual style of this game.” His example is the Lost Soul, “a screaming skull with horns and flames coming out the back, a heavy metal inspired demon design if there ever was one.”
DOOM Eternal came out on March 20, 2020, with Martin directing, and this time he reached for a horror film. At E3 in 2019 he told Shacknews, “This is our Evil Dead 2,” the same film id’s first team had named a quarter of a century earlier. It had, he told The Hollywood Reporter, “the perfect balance between gore and slapstick humor.”
When id’s people name sources for the hell in these two games, they name heavy metal, album covers and horror films. The one painter who comes up is Zdzisław Beksiński: a concept artist, Colin Geller, wrote that a few early mood paintings of the 2016 hell were done “with color palettes inspired by the work of Zdzisław Beksiński.”
DOOM: The Dark Ages, the Night Sentinels and id’s own doom
Under the metal, DOOM Eternal had already given its hell a medieval past. The Slayer’s backstory puts him among the Night Sentinels, knights of the world Argent D’Nur sworn to its king, and it gives hell a clergy, three Hell Priests, Deag Nilox, Deag Ranak and Deag Grav. A Sentinel’s betrayal let hell take Argent D’Nur, a kingdom of knights handed over to the damned.
Then id went the rest of the way. DOOM: The Dark Ages, released on May 15, 2025 and directed by Hugo Martin, is a prequel set on Argent D’Nur itself, in what id calls a “dark and sinister medieval war against Hell,” with the Slayer “bound to serve as the super weapon of gods and kings” among ruined castles, carrying a shield saw and riding a Mecha Dragon. Martin told Edge the setting was chosen to go darker: “When you think medieval, dark fantasy, you think torture devices, ropes, chains, and spikes.” His touchstones were action films, Conan and Leonidas, not church walls.
So id never cited a doom painting. But a wall painter in 1470 put the damned in chains, crowns and a bishop’s mitre among them, and drove them into a monster’s mouth, and by 2025 id was building chains, spikes, kings and a holy war against hell in the Middle Ages. The two dooms started out sharing only a word; by now they share most of the picture.
To Become Worth Destroying puts that fight in one frame. A lone figure with a long blade stands on a black crag in a sea of fire, and a skull the size of the sky burns over him. Where the Salisbury painter drove the damned into the fire in chains, this picture leaves one figure standing his ground in it.
Frequently asked questions
What is a doom painting?
The English name for a medieval painting of the Last Judgement on a church wall, usually over the chancel arch, where everyone facing the altar faced it, with heaven on Christ’s right hand and hell on his left.
What did doom paintings usually show?
Christ in judgement, often on a rainbow and showing his wounds, with the Virgin Mary and St John pleading for the souls. The dead rise from their graves, St Michael weighs souls, St Peter meets the saved at heaven’s gate, and demons drive the damned, kings and bishops among them, into a hell-mouth shaped like a monster’s jaws.
Where can you see a doom painting in England?
St Thomas’s in Salisbury has the largest and best preserved, about 1470. St Peter’s in Wenhaston, Suffolk, has one on boards of about 1500, Holy Trinity in Coventry one from the 1430s, and Chaldon in Surrey a judgement of about 1200 on its west wall.
Why is the game called DOOM?
John Carmack took the name from The Color of Money (1986), where Tom Cruise’s pool hustler is asked what’s in his cue case and answers “Doom.” id Software released DOOM on December 10, 1993.
Was DOOM inspired by doom paintings?
Not by its makers’ account: heavy metal and 1980s album covers for the 2016 game’s hell, Evil Dead II for DOOM Eternal, a film for the name, and action films for The Dark Ages. But Eternal’s Night Sentinels and The Dark Ages’ medieval war against hell bring the game into the doom painting’s own world of knights, kings and the damned.
Read next
- The Garden of Earthly Delights, explained, Bosch’s whole triptych, hell wing included.
- The sublime in art, John Martin’s apocalypses.
- The paintings inside Elden Ring, Bosch, Doré, Friedrich and Bruegel beside another game.
- Goya’s Black Paintings, explained, fourteen paintings made on the walls of a house.
References
- “Doom painting,” Wikipedia, and Anne Marshall, “Medieval Paintings of the Doom,” Medieval Wall Painting in the English Parish Church: wikipedia.org, paintedchurch
- “Doom,” Online Etymology Dictionary: etymonline.com
- The Bible, King James Version, Matthew 25 and Job 41, Project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org
- St Thomas’s Church, Salisbury, “Doom painting” and Rodney Maude, A Brief History of St Thomas’s Church (2018): stthomassalisbury.co.uk
- Thomas Dowson, “The Doom Painting of St Thomas’s Church, Salisbury,” Archaeology Travel: archaeology-travel.com. Peter Martindale, “The Salisbury Doom,” Historic Churches (2021): buildingconservation.com
- “Edwardian Reformation,” Wikipedia: wikipedia.org. The Injunctions of 1559, in Henry Gee and William John Hardy (eds.), Documents Illustrative of English Church History (1896): hanover.edu
- Kathleen Whale, “The Wenhaston Doom: a biography of a sixteenth-century panel painting,” Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 39, part 3 (1999), 299–316: suffolkinstitute.org.uk. Simon Knott, “St Peter, Wenhaston,” Suffolk Churches: suffolkchurches.co.uk. Historic England listing, Church of St Peter, Wenhaston: britishlistedbuildings.co.uk
- Holy Trinity Coventry, “The Doom painting”: holytrinitycoventry.org.uk. Chaldon Church, “The Chaldon mural”: chaldonchurch.co.uk
- Churches Conservation Trust, “Headaches, plagues and wall paintings”: visitchurches.org.uk
- National Museum in Gdańsk, “The Last Judgement by Hans Memling”: sadostateczny.mng.gda.pl. Web Gallery of Art, Memling, Last Judgment: wga.hu
- John Martin, Le Pandemonium, 1841, Musée du Louvre, RF 2006 21: collections.louvre.fr. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org
- David Kushner, Masters of Doom (Random House, 2003; Piatkus, 2004), pp. 122–123 in the Piatkus edition. “John Carmack,” Doomworld interview, 1999: doomworld.com
- Andrew Reiner, “Doom: A New Vision Of Hell,” Game Informer, January 15, 2016: gameinformer.com
- “The Art of DOOM: Demons” and “The Art of DOOM: From Mars to Hell,” Bethesda.net, June 6, 2016: demons, Mars to Hell
- Brittany Vincent, “Hugo Martin on Doom Eternal: ‘This is our Evil Dead 2’,” Shacknews, June 18, 2019: shacknews.com. Trilby Beresford, “‘DOOM Eternal’ Game Director on Drawing Inspiration From Classic Horror,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 21, 2020: hollywoodreporter.com
- DOOM: The Dark Ages, official page, id Software and Bethesda: doom.bethesda.net; Steam store listing: store.steampowered.com
- Joelle Daniels, “DOOM: The Dark Ages Will Be Dark and Sinister Thanks to Medieval Fantasy Setting,” GamingBolt, February 21, 2025, reporting Hugo Martin’s interview in Edge: gamingbolt.com. Matt Vatankhah, “id Software’s Hugo Martin and Marty Stratton Talk ‘DOOM: The Dark Ages’,” VICE, March 31, 2025: vice.com
- Night Sentinels, Argent D’Nur and Hell Priest, DOOM Wiki: Night Sentinels, Argent D’Nur, Hell Priest, Deag Grav
- “Doom: The Dark Ages,” Wikipedia: wikipedia.org
- “Doom (1993 video game)” and “Doom Eternal,” Wikipedia: Doom, Doom Eternal