Christ enters Hell through a gate in a citadel on the left. His crossed staff is held aloft and he is surrounded by a blaze of yellow light. Hell is populated by naked humans and monsters. Severed human limbs are suspended in different places throughout the landscape. More naked figures are being disgorged from the mouth of a large, squat monster near the top of the picture; in the upper right is a blazing inferno.

An account of Christ's descent into Hell and his 'Harrowing of Hell' is given in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. Four pictures by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) of this subject are mentioned in early sources, but unfortunately none of these paintings can now be identified.

This painting is a copy of a slightly smaller picture in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. Several other versions of the Vienna composition are known. The Vienna picture, this work, and all the other known versions are inferior to the accepted works of Hieronymus Bosch in the richness of their fantasy and in the decorative quality of their design that they cannot be considered even as free copies of a lost painting by Bosch. It is more likely that these works are imitations, not based upon a specific lost original, but produced in the mid sixteenth century when there was a high demand for pictures in the style of Bosch.