The notion of the destruction of the world existed long before men had the means to destroy it themselves. If one did not know the date of this watercolour, one might assume that it was a vision of atomic destruction. It was painted in 1525. The story of how it came to be painted is best told in Dürer’s own words.
In the night between Wednesday and Thursday, after Whitsunday, I saw this appearance in my sleep – how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the earth about four miles away from me with terrific force and tremendous noise, and it broke up and drowned the whole land. I was so sore afraid that I awoke from it. Then the other waters fell, and as they fell they were very powerful and there were many of them, some further away, some nearer. And they came down from so great a height that they all seemed to fall with an equal slowness. But when the first water that touched the earth had very nearly reached it, it fell with such swiftness, with wind and roaring, and I was so sore afraid that when I awoke my whole body trembled and for a long while I could not recover myself. So when I arose in the morning I painted it above here as I saw it. God turn all things to the best.
Dürer was fifty-four when he painted this work.
Years previously, as a young man, he had made a series of woodcuts illustrating the end of the world as foreseen in the Apocalypse; these were full of conventional medieval symbols and figures. This dream is different. Its horror is not part of a doctrine or recipe. It is the spontaneous creation of Dürer’s unconscious dreaming self. As in many nightmares, its ingredients include vast space, limitless water and a massive and oppressive sense of weight. Whether these elements relate to a dim recollection of the trauma of birth or to a premonition of death is not very important; what matters is that they augur a terrible finality. Yet the vision in itself is almost innocuous. Our deepest fears reside just behind the everyday and the banal. The trickles of water are like those that run down a windowpane through which we are looking at the landscape. Suddenly there is a fearful change of scale. The trickle in the middle is seen to be four miles away and is thus immense, a vast deluge, the colour of blood seen through pale skin, the colour of a bruise which is the result of its own world-destroying blow.
