The Extinction Event: The Beginning of the End

Tate Britain, the redoubtable art museum, opened an exhibit about the 19th century painter John Martin on 21 September, 2011. Tantalizingly titled John Martin: Apocalypse, the exhibition was intended to bring this mostly forgotten painter, a flash-in-the-pan during his own lifetime, to the attention of a modern audience by associating his gigantic, Biblical paintings with an emerging cultural fascination with the end of the world.

It would be hard to mistake Martins paintings for anything ot...