With the sole purpose of further accentuating the believer's faith, the representation of heaven and hell was humanized, taking the form of the blessed soul (the embodiment of bliss, in an attitude of peace and serenity), and the damned soul (personification of pain and suffering amidst the flames of hell). A woman with a kind of mystical aura, accentuated by her view of the heavens, expressing peace, is generally associated with the blessed soul. Her antithesis, meanwhile, is reflected in the damned soul, in the throes of agony and despair, in a final attempt to escape hell.

The rise in depictions of this kind came about following the Council of Trent (1545-1563), where the existence of purgatory was recognized, being the state reserved for those who, having died in God's grace, needed further purification before entering heaven. The Jesuit Order also contributed to the dissemination of this notion of different fates or conditions of the soul during the 17th century, through devotional books with written tales accompanied by prints that served to consolidate the iconography figuratively. We know of examples from around 1600 by Flemish engravers such as Pieter de Jode I and Karel van Mallery alluding to the four fates of the soul, which subsequently inspired contemporary works by artists such as the Italian sculptor Giovanni Bernardino Azzolino, and his wax models belonging to London's Victoria & Albert Museum. Major geniuses of the art world, such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, also dared to tackle this subject matter, as demonstrated by his famous sculptural pair, Anima beata and Anima dannata, executed in 1619, and preserved today at the Spanish Embassy in the Holy See. Pictorially, other artists also portrayed these fates of the soul in accordance with preestablished engraved models, as in the case of Francisco Ribalta who, in about 1610, executed a pair of paintings as devotional works intended for the king's oratory in the Palace of Aranjuez, currently preserved in the Prado Museum's collection in Madrid.