modern apocalyptic
images
The following iconographic narratives and subjects are included in the discussion of the theme Apocalypse:
he word apocalypse in its original Greek sense refers to a “revealing” or “unveiling.” But the word is much more commonly and specifically applied to a type of visionary reli- gious literature prophesying the end of the physical world. Such writings flourished between the second century b.c. and the second century a.d. In the canonical Bible the chief examples are in certain portions of the Book of Daniel (7–12) and in the last book of the New Testament, the Apocalypse, or the Revelation of St. John the Divine. Of all apocalyptic literature, the latter is of by far the greatest importance for iconographic tradition.
The Revelation of St. John the Divine, a work of extended, obscure, and very complex imagery and symbolism, has inspired correspondingly complex programs of illustration throughout the history of Christian art. Each major period has produced stylistic and iconographic interpretations of such apocalyptic phenomena as the Opening of the Seven Seals (Revelation 5–8), the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Revelation 6:1–8), the Two Witnesses (Revelation 11), the Woman Clothed with the Sun (Revelation 12:1–2), the Seven- Headed Beast (Revelation 12–13), the Adoration of the Lamb (Revelation 7:9–17), the Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17), the Heavenly Jerusalem (Revelation 21), and many more. It is impossible in a short article to describe all these visual riches; rather, a brief survey of a few of the more outstanding pictori- al cycles can be offered.
Many heavily illustrated manuscripts of commentary on Revelation and Daniel were produced in early medieval Spain by the eighth-century monk Beatus of Liebana. These sets of images, repeated often in tenth- and eleventh-century books (with Daniel illustrations forming only a small part of the pro- gram), refer not to the commentary but to the original biblical text. The paintings are executed in the so-called Mozarabic style, an art of intense color and bold, semiabstract design.
A later and quite different body of medieval illustration is found in numerous English apocalypse manuscripts of the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries; here the material is cast in an elegant, courtly style that might seem at odds with the violence and cosmic extravagance of the written source. The distinctive set of late-fourteenth-century French tapestries preserved in Angers provides another example of a late medieval apocalypse cycle, but in a very different scale and medium.
With the development of printing techniques in the fifteenth century, many apocalypse illustrations were produced in popu- lar woodcut block-books. At a far higher aesthetic level is the group of 14 woodcuts made by Albrecht Dürer in the 1490s, a technical and expressive tour de force and one of the most widely known of all apocalypse programs. Among other graph-
ic series of note are the 21 woodcuts by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop appearing in a Bible published at Wittenberg in 1522—illustrations strongly influenced by Dürer’s prints but with the insertion of numerous bits of explic- it Protestant propaganda—and a set of 24 engravings, extraor- dinary for their Mannerist elaboration, produced in 1561 by the French goldsmith Jean Duvet.
As Christian themes gradually declined in importance over the following periods, major apocalypse illustrative cycles were seldom undertaken. But during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a revived feeling for mystical, fantastic, and emotion- ally charged imagery led to several brilliantly personal inter- pretations of Revelation. Around 1810 William Blake brought his fervent imagination to a set of 12 watercolors on apocalyp- tic motifs. In 1899 Odilon Redon, illustrator of many bizarre texts, published a 12-piece portfolio of lithographs in which figures from the apocalypse are treated in concentrated black- and-white visions comparable to the mood of symbolist poetry. German Expressionist Max Beckmann provided 27 hand-col- ored lithographs for an edition of the Apocalypse issued in 1943; a set of 15 apocalypse illustrations, also color litho- graphs, was produced by the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo in 1959.
Among the vast array of apocalypse imagery a few subjects gained significant currency as separate motifs. During the Middle Ages the most widespread of these autonomous motifs was taken from the fourth chapter of Revelation. An august fig- ure, to be understood as Christ the Lord, is seen seated on a throne and surrounded by four “living creatures”—a lion, an ox, a man (or angel), and an eagle, all with wings—and 24 “elders” wearing crowns. This vision was generally taken as a prophesy of the Second Coming of Christ. The assorted atten- dant figures are quite enigmatic, but exegetical thought came to invest them with much symbolic content. The four “living crea- tures,” which had appeared earlier in the prophesy of Ezekiel (1:5–14), were understood in early Christian times as signifying the four Evangelists: the lion, Mark; the ox, Luke; the angel, Matthew; the eagle, John. The representation of the enthroned Christ surrounded by the four winged creatures is a familiar subject in early medieval art through the twelfth century and is found in manuscript painting, ivory carving, frescoes, and other media. This iconographic device, commonly called Christ in Majesty, departs from the biblical text in some respects: the four creatures carry books or scrolls as references to the writ- ings of the four Evangelists, and Christ usually makes a gesture of blessing with his right hand and holds a book in his left.
As monumental architectural sculpture rapidly developed in the twelfth century, the Christ in Majesty motif was repeatedly
Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen, circa 1496–1498, woodcut from The
Apocalypse, Washington, D.C., National
Gallery of Art, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
apocalypse 41
used to fill the tympana of church doorways. The Second Coming was thus one of the great eschatological themes of Romanesque sculpture, providing an alternative to the Last Judgment seen on other portals. The large spaces of the portal designs there often included the 24 elders, crowned and hold- ing musical instruments. Especially fine examples of such ensembles are at the church of St.-Pierre in Moissac and on the western facade of Chartres Cathedral, both in France. The Moissac tympanum, dating from around 1125–1135, sur- rounds an immense Christ with a crowded assemblage: direct- ly beside him are the four winged creatures; closely bracketing the central gathering are two extravagantly tall angels; and the remainder of the space is filled by the elders, small actively posed figures disposed in several horizontal rows. The Chartres portal, of a slightly later date, is markedly more formal and stately in character: the tympanum is of relatively modest size and contains only Christ and the four winged creatures, all sim- ply arranged so that there is a generous interval between the figures; the elders, as well as a series of angels, are relegated to the archivolts, forming concentric arches that create a strong neutral frame around the tympanum; the 12 apostles are aligned on the lintel below the tympanum.
Another apocalyptic vision that formed an important inde- pendent tradition is the Woman Clothed with the Sun (mulier
amicta sole) of the twelfth chapter of Revelation—a woman
with the moon under her feet and her head crowned by 12 stars, who “brought forth a man child, who was to rule the nations . . . ” (Revelation 12:5). The woman was readily seen as an image of the Virgin Mary in cosmic glory. By the end of the Middle Ages impressive works of art centered around this theme. Such is the late-fifteenth-century altarpiece in Moulins Cathedral in France, where the Virgin, holding the Christ Child, is enthroned above a thin crescent moon, a large yellow sun expanding behind her and angels holding over her head a golden crown decorated with stars; additional angels gather around the space, with two, at the bottom, displaying a scroll bearing the relevant quotation from the apocalypse. The altar- piece is completed by shutters, showing, at left, the donor Pierre II, Duke of Bourbon, accompanied by Saint Peter, and, at right, the Duchess of Bourbon, Anne of France, with her daughter Suzanne and accompanied by St. Anne; the closed shutters represent the Annunciation to the Virgin. During the Counter-Reformation the motif was often taken up as a symbol of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, a significant issue in Catholic dogma. Especially in seventeenth-century Spain, where Counter-Reformation feeling was strong, the Virgin Immaculate was often represented in this way. In numerous paintings Bartolomé Esteban Murillo depicted a very youthful Virgin, without the Christ Child, standing on a sickle moon, surrounded by bright sunshine, light clouds, and a host of tiny angels.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Revelation 6:1–8) have had a significant place in popular parlance and imagery. They are revealed at the opening of the first four seals: the Conqueror, holding a bow and riding a white horse; a figure signifying War, with a sword, riding a red horse; a figure per- haps suggesting Famine, holding a pair of scales, riding a black
horse; and Death, riding a pale horse and followed by Hell. The four have sometimes been represented together as an autonomous image—for example, in a painting by Arnold Böcklin of about 1895, in the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister in Dresden, Germany, in which the riders soar over a modern city. The riders also have been shown individually—as in Henri Rousseau’s remarkable painting War, at the Louvre in Paris, a free variation on the Apocalypse text, in which the rider is a fierce young woman waving a sword and torch while riding a black horse across a desolate field covered with naked corpses upon which feed a flock of dark birds. But the most frequently and famously repeated motif from this apocalyptic passage has been that of Death on a Pale Horse.
In a 1506 drawing at the British Museum in London Dürer shows Death as a skeleton holding a scythe (conventional sym- bol of the grim reaper) and sitting on a weak, bony horse. Salvador Dalí perhaps had that model in mind when making his dramatic drawing of a similarly mounted skeleton, holding a lance rather than a scythe, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During the late eighteenth and early nine- teenth centuries Benjamin West produced several variations of his epic composition Death on the Pale Horse. Here Death, fol- lowed by many dark grotesque monsters of hell, surges for- ward, brandishing in both hands piercing rays of light while his steed tramples a mass of defenseless figures, prominent among whom is a family of youthful parents and two small children; in a subordinate role at the right of the very wide work are the three other riders, on red, white, and black horses. In West’s culminating version of the theme (at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia) the group of white-clad souls that appears upon the opening of the fifth seal is seen at the extreme right in the distant sky. In the first years of the twenti- eth century another American painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder, created an utterly different imagining of the motif: a lonely Death, scythe in hand, drives his horse around a racetrack set on an empty, featureless terrain (at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio).
An important Christian subject thematically related to apoc- alyptic imagery is the Last Judgment, which has a very rich iconographic history. This subject, however, is not appropriate for inclusion here because the Last Judgment is not explicitly described in Revelation and, indeed, almost all of its tradition- al iconographic elements are derived from other sources.
Beyond any particular religious doctrine, the adjective apoc-
alyptic is often applied to concepts and images concerned with
vast general decline or destruction. An extensive, ill-defined body of representations, especially some of the expressionist art of modern times, may be considered apocalyptic in this sense. For example, Pablo Picasso’s mural Guernica has been called apocalyptic, referring to the bombing of the town of that name during the Spanish Civil War. The painting exceeds the limits of that one event to suggest in symbolic forms the enveloping hor- ror of total mechanical military destruction. Many works of the contemporary German painter Anselm Kiefer show immense, unoccupied, decaying architectural interiors or blasted, lifeless, flat landscapes—dark visions subject to various subjective interpretations but strongly suggestive of a twilight universe 42 apocalypse
with little or no hope. In the Firestorm series—large drawings in ink and charcoal filled by amorphous surges of blackness— American Robert Morris has devoted much of his time to the distinctly apocalyptic theme of nuclear holocaust.
See also Damned Souls; Death; Destruction of Cities;
Order/Chaos
Selected Works of Art
Total Programs
Beatus of Liebana, Commentary on the Book of Revelation
and the Book of Daniel, copy of eighth century
manuscript, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library (MS 664)
The Trinity Apocalypse, circa 1230–1250, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, Trinity College Library (MS. R.16.2)
The Angers Apocalypse, tapestries, late fourteenth century,
Angers, France, Castle, New Gallery
Dürer, Albrecht, The Apocalypse, woodcuts, 1497–1498 Blake, William, suite of 12 watercolors on Apocalypse motifs,
circa 1799–1810, various collections
Redon, Odilon, Apocalypse de Saint-Jean, lithographs, 1899 Beckmann, Max, Die Apokalypse, before 1950
Tamayo, Rufino, Apocalypse of Saint John, fifteen lithographs, 1959
Christ in Majesty
Ivory Plaque, tenth century, Berlin, Staatliche Museen
Preussischer Kulturbesitz
Portal Sculpture, west facade, circa 1145–1155, Chartres,
France, Chartres Cathedral
Portal Sculpture, circa 1110–1120, Moissac, Sainte-Pierre The Woman Clothed with the Sun
Master of Moulins, Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, late fifteenth century, France, Moulins Cathedral Murillo, Estebán Bartolomé, The Immaculate Conception,
Madrid, Prado
Rubens, Peter Paul, The Virgin as the Woman of the
Apocalypse, oil on canvas, 1623–1624, Los Angeles,
California, J. Paul Getty Museum
Blake, William, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman
Clothed with the Sun: “The Devil Is Come Down,” pen
and watercolor, circa 1805, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art
Death on a Pale Horse
Dürer, Albrecht, King Death on a Horse, drawing, 1505, London, British Museum
Blake, William, Death on a Pale Horse, pen and watercolor over pencil, circa 1800, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum West, Benjamin, Death on a Pale Horse, 1802, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Ryder, Albert Pinkham, The Race Track, circa 1910, Cleveland, Ohio, Museum of Art
The Whore of Babylon
Blake, William, The Whore of Babylon, pen and watercolor, 1809, London, British Museum
Modern Apocalyptic Images
Groux, Henry de, Cataclysm, oil on canvas, circa 1893, Paris, Flamand-Charbonnier Collection
Meidner, Ludwig, Apocalyptic Landscape, 1913, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Picasso, Pablo, Guernica, 1937, Madrid, Reina Sofía Echaurren, Robert Matta, The Taste of Apocalypse,
1957–1958, private collection
Kiefer, Anselm, To the Unknown Painter, 1983, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Museum of Art
Morris, Robert, from Firestorm series, Frankfurt, Germany, Museum für Moderne Kunst
Further Reading
Bjelajac, David, Millennial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision
of Washington Allston, Washington, D.C. and London:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988
Emmerson, Richard Kenneth, and Bernard McGinn, eds., The
Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1993
Gassen, Richard W., and Bernhard Holeczek, eds.,
Apokalypse: Ein Prinzip Hoffnung? Ernst Bloch zum 100, Geburtstag, Heidelberg, Germany: Edition Braus, 1985
Gousset, Maria-Thérèse, “La représentation de la Jérusalem jusqu’à l’epoque carolingienne,” Cahiers Archéologique XVIII (1974)
Gumpert, Lynn, The End of the World: Contemporary
Visions of the Apocalypse, New York: The New Museum
of Contemporary Art, 1983
Henkel, Kathryn, The Apocalypse, College Park, Maryland: University of Maryland Art Gallery, 1973
James, Montague Rhodes, The Apocalypse in Art, Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1931
Lewis, Suzanne, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and
Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1995
Van der Meer, Frederick, Apocalypse: Visions from the Book
of Revelations in Western Art, New York: Alpine Fine Arts
Collection, 1978; London: Thames and Hudson, 1978 Paley, Morton D., The Apocalyptic Sublime, New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale University Press, 1986 Sharrett, Christopher, ed., Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic
Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film, Washington, D.C.:
Maisonneuve Press, 1993
Williams, John, The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the
Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse,
London: Harvey Miller, 1994
45
APOTHEOSIS/
DEIFICATION
ancient
renaissance
seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries
nineteenth century
The following periods are covered in the discussion of the theme Apotheosis/Deification: