Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse

Revelation of St. John.

In Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy, John of Patmos, the author of the Book of Revelation, is referred to as “Saint John the Mushroom-head”, the suggestion being that the bizarre and grotesque scenes listed at the end of the Bible were the result of hallucinogenic frenzy. Mushroom-derived or not, John’s apocalyptic visions have fuelled the imagination of artists for a very long time, and in a wide variety of media. The earlier chapters of the New Testament are the more popular ones when it comes to adaptations but only the Book of Revelation has inspired two monuments of progressive rock: the 666 album by Aphrodite’s Child, and Supper’s Ready by Genesis.

Martyrdom of Saint John the Evangelist.

Die Offenbarung St. Johannis (1900) is a recent upload at the Internet Archive which presents Albrecht Dürer’s magnificent set of Apocalypse woodcuts in a single volume. Multiple copies of the same prints may be found at Wikimedia Commons but sets of pictures there are always divided into separate pages; where possible, I prefer to have a book to leaf through. I love to pore over Dürer’s prints, they’re always crowded with tiny details rendered with great precision. The fifth plate in this series, showing the arrival of the Four Horsemen, is the one you see reproduced most often, and it’s a typically cramped composition; Dürer was an artist who often seemed to want to cram as much as possible into the available space. Some of the later plates in the series have the same powerful sense of occult strangeness that you find in the best alchemical engravings, especially plate eleven which shows John being instructed by an angel with a blazing face to eat a book. The Biblical text describes the angel as appearing suspended over columns of fire, but Dürer shows the columns as a pair of architectural limbs that happen to be burning at their terminations. It’s an example of proto-Surrealist imagery that makes me wonder what a set of Albrecht Dürer Tarot cards might have looked like.

Vision of the Seven Candlesticks.

Saint John Before God and the Elders.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Opening of the Sixth Seal.

Four Angels Holding Back the Winds.

Hymn in Adoration of the Lamb.

Opening of the Seventh Seal.

Four Angels of Death.

Saint John Eating the Book.

Woman of the Apocalypse and the Seven-headed Dragon.

Saint Michael Fighting the Dragon.

The Beast with the Lamb’s Horns and the Beast with Seven Heads.

Whore of Babylon.

Angel with the Key of the Bottomless Pit.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dürer’s Instruction of Measurement
• Eustace details
• Melencolia details
• Albrecht Dürer’s Triumphal Arch