Both the Bible and Quran present life on earth as a preparation for life after death and describe a Day of Judgement when God will come to ‘judge the living and the dead’.^[76] In the afterlife, ‘those who believe [in God] and do good deeds, they are dwellers of Paradise, they [will] dwell therein forever’,^[77] but for ‘those who have disbelieved and died in disbelief, the earth full of gold would not be accepted from any of them if it were offered as a ransom. They will have a painful punishment, and they will have no helpers’.^[78] This painting in the Khamsa manuscript (see cat. no. 21) is a reinterpretation of a Flemish engraving of c.1580 depicting the Last Judgement by Adriaen Collaert, after Jan van der Straet. Jesus, flanked by Mary and St John the Baptist, sits on a rainbow looking down as the dead rise up and divide between the good and the evil, the believers and the disbelievers. Angels help those chosen to ascend to heaven while demonic beasts usher the damned to descend to hell.

The painting has not been traced from the engraving and the Mughal artists Nanha and Manohar, who jointly worked on this painting, made many alterations.^[79] The figures are fewer in number, of a slightly altered scale, and their hyper-masculine musculature is here replaced with a far softer, smoother treatment of form. The cross held by St John the Baptist does not feature in the Mughal version, being a symbol of the Resurrection (eschewed in Muslim faith). Other alterations are more artistic in nature: instead of the monochrome of the engraving, the Mughal artists used contrasting shades of colour – bright pigments for the believers and shadowy tones for the disbelievers – for symbolic effect. The faces of Mary and Jesus and certain areas of drapery are more worked up than other areas of the painting and are reminiscent of other works by the artist Manohar.^[80]