11
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
(woodcut, 1498)
As the year 1500 drew near, Europe was grasped by an apocalyptic fever. It was especially fervent in Germany, which had faced so many difficulties during the fifteenth century: ravenous plagues and rampant diseases, grievous social injustices and inequalities, famines, wars, and the imminent threat of the Turkish Muslims who were encamped at the borders of Germanic territory. Surely these were signs of the end of days? In addition to all the social and cultural upheaval, it was a time of questioning the theology and practices of the powerful Roman Catholic Church. Jan Hus, one of the earliest Reformers, preached the need for a return to a simple and pristine gospel unencumbered by all the traditions that obscured it. For his efforts, he became a martyr. But his death did not quiet the growing demand for religious revival and renewal. The Reformation had not yet fully taken root, but the day when Martin Luther would nail his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church was not far off.
With so many wondering if indeed the end was at hand, there was a resurgence of interest in the book of Revelation. Christians looked to it for insight into the dark times they were living in, and for hope that God might intervene in the chaos of their world. It was into this environment that Albrecht Dürer launched his illustrations of the book of Revelation. Dürer was the first artist to make use of the new technology of printing, which had been developed by Gutenberg, to publish his own art book. This book, self-published in 1498, contained the text of Revelation, also known as “the Apocalypse,” accompanied by fifteen vivid and detailed woodcuts. It proved of such enduring popularity that it provided Dürer with income for the rest of his life. (In 1511 he created a second version, with Latin text.)
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC [Wikimedia Commons, CC-PD-Mark]
These fifteen striking images rendered the symbolic and the spiritual images of this sometimes rather difficult biblical text with a naturalistic precision and an abundance of fascinating detail. Dürer took the complex imagery of Revelation and made it real, in the process creating mental pictures that still influence contemporary readers of the final book of the New Testament.
One of the most enduring of these images is that of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a nightmare vision of the awful terrors to be faced at the end of time, as predicted in Revelation 6. Dürer shows us Pestilence on a white horse with bow and arrow, War on a red horse with sword in hand, Famine on a black horse carrying empty scales, and Death as a skeletal form riding a pale horse and brandishing a scythe. Humankind is being trampled in their wake as they come sweeping into the scene from out of the shadows. To his contemporaries, Dürer’s images were vivid symbolic depictions of realities that they knew all too well. Because he illustrated the horsemen with realistic detail, they took on an even greater resonance.
Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1471. His father was a goldsmith and jeweler, and young Albrecht showed an early talent at rendering the kind of fine details demanded by his father’s craft. But what really set young Dürer apart was his unusual talent for drawing. His family supported him in this endeavor, and he was given the opportunity to travel throughout Europe, learning the styles and techniques of his most-talented peers. Since he was a diligent student and quick learner, he would eventually outdo most of them.
It is the stunning precision of his paintings, drawings, and etchings that we often think of today whenever Dürer’s name is mentioned. His passionate interest in science and mathematics impacted his artistry and enhanced his ability to make things look convincingly real under his brush, pen, or engraving tool. (Such was his knowledge that he even wrote books on geometry, perspective, and proportion.) Because printing had been invented in Germany in the 1440s, Dürer could respond to the need for illustrations for the texts of the volumes that were coming off the new presses. His eye for detail led him to artistic innovations in the woodcuts and engravings that graced the pages of many books. He discovered ways to use the spacing of parallel lines and crosshatching to create different tonalities of dark and light for his compositions, and these are deployed in especially effective ways in works such as the Apocalypse woodcuts; St. Jerome in His Study (1514); the much-reproduced Praying Hands (c. 1508); Adam and Eve; Knight, Death, and the Devil (1507); and the mysterious Melancholia I (1514).
Dürer’s observational powers are also evident in his many depictions of animals and growing things. He was a keen student of nature, so his lifelike images are utterly convincing—whether of weeds and grasses or of a rabbit whose fur is so finely rendered that you would expect to feel the silky texture were you to touch the paper on which it is drawn.
Dürer used these same powers for depicting people, and was in demand as a portrait painter despite the fact that he tended to take a more “warts and all” approach than other artists who idealized their subjects. His people are real. We feel as if we know them, as if we might have conversed with them in the street. He clearly had a fascination with faces, and no face fascinated him more than his own. He was one of the first artists to make himself the subject of his own painting, and he created numerous self-portraits throughout his artistic career. One of these is a remarkable painting done in 1500, when he was twenty-eight, which is notable for its nearness to the classic depiction of Christ. This “imitation of Christ” self-portrait meant so much to him that it never left his studio. It was a reminder to him that we are all striving to live lives similar to that of our Lord.
A man of deep faith, Dürer was committed to the God who had created all the beautiful minutiae of the world that he so loved to draw, paint, and engrave. Though he was not one given to making grand theological pronouncements, some of the thoughts he shared in his letters and diaries make it clear that he had great sympathy toward the Reformation, which was still in its infancy. In his diary he referred to Martin Luther as a man “pious and enlightened by the Holy Ghost, a successor of Christ, and a follower of the true Christian faith.” One of his great regrets was that he never got to paint Luther, a work that would have served “as a lasting memorial to the Christian man who has helped me out of great anxiety.” Dürer was critical of the corruption he saw in the papacy and longed for a more pure expression of the gospel. “O Lord,” he wrote, “give us hereafter the new beatified Jerusalem which will descend from heaven as told in the Apocalypse; the divinely pure gospel, untarnished by human doctrine.”1
Albrecht Dürer’s art is filled with a love for the rich and teeming wild world that God created as well as a longing for a better world to come. Whether his subject was the book of Revelation, a gentle hare, or a knight in peril on the road to salvation, he illustrated this love and longing with careful detail and great joy.