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For centuries, artists and visionaries have been picturing the apocalypse. Whether it be through paintings, sculptures, movies or interactive installations, this desire to picture the end of the world has existed throughout time, continuing from the earliest days of mankind to this very present moment. Dr Natasha O'Hear selects and explains 10 images depicting the Apocalypse.
Hans Memling
This is perhaps the greatest apocalyptic image of all time. It's Hans Memling's visualization of the entirety of John's vision of the end times (which became the Book of Revelation). Here we see John sitting on the island of Patmos (where he had been exiled to), with his fantastical visions passing before his eyes. The action moves from the heavenly throne room in the top left hand corner of the image (Rev. 4-5), and then down through the Four Horsemen (Rev. 6) and back through the various cycles of natural disasters, plagues, war and famine that characterize much of the narrative of the Book of Revelation. At the top of the image we can see the Woman Clothed with the Sun (Rev. 12) fighting the Great Red Dragon (Satan) and on the Horizon we can see a tiny visualization of the Sea-Beast of Rev. 13. The impression we are left with is that the visions will keep appearing over the horizon. What is so striking about this image is the way in which it evokes not only the narrative of the Book of Revelation but in doing so also captures something of the nature of visionary experience itself.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Albrecht Dürer's iconic visualisation of the Apocalypse, in which he condensed the narrative of the Book of Revelation into a mere 15 woodcut images (as opposed to the 80 or so images of the illuminated manuscript versions of the text) represents the first serious attempt to exploit the economic potential of the Apocalypse by giving it a "Renaissance-spin." His 'Apocalypse books' were a sellout and went through many more editions during the early 16th Century. While Dürer's Four Horsemen is perhaps the best-known image from this series today, this beautiful image of St Michael and his Angels fighting the Dragon (Rev.12) is a wonderful evocation of the heavenly apocalyptic drama described in this Chapter. And down below, the earthly realm, here depicted by Dürer as late 15th-Century Nuremberg remains oblivious to the fight between good and evil that rages above. A poor imitation artistically, this series, in which the Beasts and the Whore of Babylon are identified as the Pope and the Church, Cranach's series represents the most enduring polemical visualisation of the Apocalypse perhaps ever seen).
© The National Gallery, London
In this unusual image, Velazquez, who also painted a companion piece entitled St John the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos, depicts the Woman Clothed with the Sun of Revelation 12 as the Virgin Mary, echoing an interpretative trend that had existed since the 5th century. In the foreground is a fountain, perhaps intended to symbolize the "river of the water of life" of the New Jerusalem of Rev. 21-22, thus implying that the two paintings taken together were intended as an unusual synthesis of the entirety of the Book of Revelation.
William Blake
Trustees of the British Museum. Although Blake had produced earlier series of illustrations of the Book of Revelation, this striking stand-alone image of the Whore of Babylon encapsulates much of Blake's unique attitude towards the Book of Revelation and the Bible itself. The Whore is wordly and sensuous but also strangely passive, possibly another victim of the Beast who is seen devouring any who have tried to resist him, who are seen fighting in a battle below. The souls whom the Whore has 'seduced' are seen flowing from her cup of abominations (Rev. 17.2) which she holds in her right hand. The Beast itself is well-known from Blake's other images of the Book of Revelation, in which he and Satan are recurring figures.
John Martin
Part of a 'triptych' of images of the Apocalypse produced by Martin in 1853, this iconic image of the Last Judgement was taken on a tour of England and America shortly after Martin's death. In the upper part of the image, God sits on a throne surrounded by the twenty-four elders of Rev. 4-5, in a foreshadowing of the New Jerusalem. Below, in the earthly realm, at God's right hand (in keeping with traditional Last Judgement iconography) are assembled the great and the good, awaiting their entrance to Heaven/New Jerusalem. They include Dante, Washington, Newton, James Watt, Shakespeare and Michelangelo. On the right, in a far more dramatic section of the image, the Whore of Babylon and other "Babylonians" are being swept and pulled down into Hell. A Catholic Bishop and two steam trains (one marked London and the other Paris) are amongst the damned, which remind us of Martin's religious sensibilities as well as his mistrust of industrialization and the modern city.
Yolanda Lopez/Courtesy the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
Yolanda Lopez is a Mexican American artist who seeks to challenge the representation of Mexican women in the American media. In her take on the Woman Clothed with the Sun (the image here is part of a series on this theme) the Virgin is represented as Lopez' own mother, depicted at her sewing machine, far from glamorous. But she is a strong, working woman, making her own destiny as she sews the Woman Clothed with the Sun's traditional blue and gold starred cloak. Like the Woman Clothed with the Sun who has been traditionally interpreted in terms of the Virgin Mary or the Church itself, the woman in this image can be seen to represent the bedrock of the Latino community.
via margaret allen/courtesy of albert keiser/planned gift for hickory museum of art
Folk artist Robert Roberg's 1991 image appeared on the front cover of the New York Times in 2005. The Whore, astride the neon-pink Beast, downs a glass of red wine while a shocked-looking elderly John looks on in amazement. This image is a playful attempt to satirize the materialism and sexual immorality that fundamentalist Christians find pervasive in contemporary American society.
Courtesy Gordon Cheung and Alan Cristea Gallery, London
Cheung is a contemporary British-Chinese artist, here taking John Martin as his starting point, but adding computing technology and a critique of contemporary capitalism to his visualization of the New Jerusalem. We see the towers of the modern city evoked by skyscraper montages of pages from the Financial Times as fire burns in the background. While in the foreground, a John-like figure stands on a rocky outcrop above "Rivers of Bliss", also fashioned out of stock market reports from the financial pages. Although the scene at the foreground of the image is peaceful, this is a rather lonely image of Paradise, and the overall message is somewhat ambiguous, unlike the images of John Martin from which Cheung has drawn inspiration.
Courtesy Jason deCaires Taylor
Jason deCaires Taylor's installation of the Four Horseman has been placed near the bankside of Vauxall Bridge. At low-tide the quartet can be seen in their entirety and at high-tide the horses are partially submerged. The piece is an excellent example of the tendency throughout history to interpret the Four Horsemen in contemporary terms and to make bold statements. DeCaires Taylor is using the Four Horsemen and their Horses (whose heads are represented by mechanisms from oil wells, also known as horseheads) to support his environmentalism: "I wanted a piece that was going to be revealed with the tide and worked with the natural environment of the Thames, but also alluded to the industrial nature of the city and its obsessive and damaging focus just on work and construction."

Editor’s Note: Natasha O’Hear is a part-time lecturer in Theology & Visual Art at ITIA. Her research interests center on visualizations of biblical texts and of Revelation in particular.

CNN  — 

As is typical of our time, over the past few months, many newscasters have used the words apocalypse or apocalyptic to evoke the negative implications of events as diverse as the threat of ‘the looming asteroid threat’, the advance of ISIS, the American housing market, global concerns over mass migration, the continuing war in Syria, the ‘Brexit,’ and even floods in the North of England (now subsided) and the so-called music streaming wars.

20th century fox
in X-Men: Apocalypse, popular character Storm is shown as one of Apocalypse's horsemen.

Added to this daily flurry of apocalyptic allusions, is endless social media discussion of the upcoming installment in the highly successful X-Men franchise, X Men: Apocalypse.

And the latest Star Wars epic (The Force Awakens), itself rife with apocalyptic resonances, is preceded by no less than six trailers for films in which young heroes and heroines toil ceaselessly to retrieve the earth from the brink of apocalypse (including London Has Fallen, Independence Day: Resurgence and Star Trek Beyond).

We have reached a point where apocalyptic vocabulary litters writing and popular culture, where Armageddon, the Four Horsemen, the Antichrist and many other words and phrases also lifted from the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation (or the Apocalypse as it is sometimes known), are used as a sort of shorthand for the calamitous times that we live in. In a way it is understandable: in a world of 24-hour news media, headlines have had to reach fever pitch in order to grab readers’ attention.

Referring to the “end of the world” is, seemingly, the only thing that will suffice.

00:48 - Source: CNN
'Star Wars' trailer reveals new footage

But calling upon apocalypticism to such an extent ultimately has a numbing effect, whereby the state of the music industry is discussed using precisely the same terms as world poverty.

Where man-made crises are viewed through the same apocalyptic prism as natural disasters such as the possible asteroid collision. There is a real sense in which the word apocalypse and its associated lexicon has lost its true meaning and impact.

This apocalyptic glut may be a recent thing in journalism, but such hypochondria isn’t actually a contemporary human trait.

Taking a look at art through the centuries shows that each generation, each epoch, has seen themselves apocalyptically, albeit with great differences as to what the actual end will involve. As we explore in our recent book, Picturing the Apocalypse, each depiction of the end of the world gives away a lot about what the most pressing concerns were at the time.

Medieval enemies

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Château d'Angers, where the Apocalypse Tapestry is located.

In medieval times, the apocalypse was frequently figured in terms of national and cultural adversaries.

So in the 13th century, the rise of anti-Semitism meant that Jews featured heavily in apocalyptic depictions, as seen in some beautiful Anglo-Norman illuminated apocalypse manuscripts.

Christ and his followers are depicted as medieval knights, while the forces of Satan are sometimes depicted as Jewish, as in the Lambeth Apocalypse of c. 1260. This sentiment culminated with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290.

Or in France, it was the English who were drafted in to herald the world’s end.

In the French life-size 14th century Angers Apocalypse Tapestry (1373-80), the followers of the Beast (a metaphorical manifestation of Satan) are clearly English soldiers (it was, after all, the time of the Hundred Years War).

Angers is also interesting in being one of the first occasions that the famous fourth Horseman – the bringer of death – is himself depicted as a skeleton, an interpretation which became increasingly common in the centuries to come.

Soon things turned more subjective.

Memling and Dürer, for example, fixated more on the nature of the visionary experience via the figure of John of Patmos, the seer of the apocalyptic events that preceding the New Jerusalem.

Dürer’s Apocalypse series of 1498 depicts John in his own likeness, the (rather grandiose) implication being that he is re-seeing the apocalypse for his own times.

Satirical beginnings

via margaret allen/courtesy of albert keiser/planned gift for hickory museum of art
Artist Robert Roberg's depiction of The Whore of Babylon. The painting was created in 1991.

During the Reformation, the Book of Revelation became an ever richer source for visual polemic. Apocalyptic images became vehicles for theological and even political propaganda. Cranach the Elder, for example, created illustrations for Luther’s first German translation of the New Testament of 1522, in which the Whore of Babylon was depicted wearing a papal tiara.

This cemented the link between the papacy and Satan (in the minds of those with reforming tendencies at least).

In the 18th century, the cartoonist James Gillray capitalized on the contemporary artistic obsession with the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse (Death) to create a memorable cartoon depicting William Pitt, the Prime Minister of the day, as the rider of the Fourth Horseman, a pointed critique of Pitt’s cynical regime (1795).

Cartoonists have continued to plunder the Book of Revelation to populate satirical images into the 20th and 21st centuries.

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An exhibition in Munich showcases the work of German artists Otto Dix and Max Beckmann.

Subjects as diverse as the Nazis, the G7 (in the 1970s), Barack Obama and contemporary culture more generally have taken a satirical apocalyptic turn. Both Max Beckmann and Otto Dix drew heavily on apocalyptic themes and the Book of Revelation as inspiration for their images critiquing the World War I and II.

Hope not despair

So what constitutes an “apocalypse” has mutated dramatically over the centuries, from the English to the Jewish to Barack Obama.

And the torrid apocalyptic speculation surrounding our own era is nothing out of the ordinary.

The journalists alluded to at the beginning of this piece are drawing on a distinguished and rich apocalyptic tradition, the details of which may have been updated to reflect new global developments and social trends but, as with previous generations, the ways in which we frame our apocalyptic expectations act more as a mirror to our collective anxieties than as signposts to an actual apocalypse.

Cathedrale de Saint Bavon
The Ghent Altarpiece Open, Overview of the open altarpiece,Completed 1432

But perhaps the truest representation of the ultimate meaning of the Book of Revelation (the main source for the Western conception of the apocalypse and apocalyptic more generally) is to be found in Van Eyck’s sublime Ghent Altarpiece of 1432.

In this painting, the Lamb of God is the center of a paradisaical vision of the New Jerusalem, the new reality which will follow Armageddon and the Last Judgment, set against a background of Flemish churches.

This altarpiece reminds us of something that may surprise the modern reader or viewer: the central character in the Book of Revelation and indeed of the apocalypse itself, is actually the Lamb of God or Christ (sometimes referred to as the Rider on the White Horse), rather than Satan or Death.

Christ is able to save those who believe from the woes and disasters which afflict followers of Satan and his Beasts, and it is hope, rather than destruction, that actually characterizes apocalyptic thought. It is this positive dimension of apocalypticism which is absent from today’s nihilistic apocalypses.

Republished under a Creative Commons license from The Conversation.