Robert Baldwin, “From Medieval Apocalypse to Renaissance Fame and Glory: Dürer's Woodcut Book of Revelations”
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
ConnecticutCollege
New London, CT06320
(This essay was written in the late 1990s and was revised in 2008.)
Written for introductory and upper-level students, this essay is dedicated to the late Konrad Oberhuber who inspired two generations of students with his depth, breadth, and passion. Teacher, mentor, and friend, Konrad sheltered us like a Renaissance Madonna del manto with an infinite compassion, tolerance, and generosity.
Apocalypse as Linear Time and Battle Between Good and Evil
Following Christian notions of linear time, the Bible offers a world history which begins with Creation and ends with the Book of Revelations (Apocalypse). Instead of turning full circle and renewing itself, as in classical culture, Christian time comes to a final and cataclysmic end. Following a period of widespread corruption, conflict, and growing chaos marked by the terrestrial reign of the Anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon, Christ returns, this time as a terrifying and severe judge, shattering earthly space and time forever. The dead rise up as intact bodies, all human beings undergo trials and tribulations, and the saved areeventually separated
from the damned. At the end of time, heavenly forces also battle demonic armies and force them into the pit of hell for all eternity. The main combat is reserved for two warriors, the Archangel Michael and Satan in the form of a great dragon. Two women also appear, gendering this final conflict: the Whore of Babylon who personifiesthe “harlotry” of all earthly, carnal life, and the unnamed Woman of the Apocalypse who suddenly appears in the heavens clothed in the sun, standing on the moon, crowned with twelve stars, and holding a child. Identified as the Madonna since the early Christian period, the Woman of the Apocalypse offered a medieval monastic antithesis of nuptial purity and chastity to the Whore of Babylon. Like the New Jerusalem and the Lamb of God, she descends at the end of time as Christ’s mystical spouse. As such, she offered Christians a beacon of hope amidst cataclysmic violence and divine retribution.
The Late Fifteenth Century as an Apocalyptic Moment
Apocalyptic and Messianic themes were only dominant in Christian piety in two periods: the early Christian period when believers widely expected Christ’s second coming, and the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance (13th – 16th century) when a wide array of developments helped create a perfect storm of Apocalyptic anxiety. These included the rise of the city, the concentration of mercantile wealth alongside great poverty, and the emergence of the urban preaching orders (Franciscans and Dominicans) who spread the monastic piety of penitence, Last Judgment, and Apocalypse into the anxious psyches of urban audiences. Urban metaphors of commerce, greed, and sexual sin, all entwined in the metaphoric nexus of prostitution, were fundamental to the Book of Revelations and coalesced in the imagery of Rome and the Whore of Babylon. Named after another infamouscity, the Whore of Babylon embodiedthe vices of the modern mercantile city in the Renaissance. Urban metaphors for sanctity and evil run throughout the Book of Revelations, with Romeand Babyloncontrasted to the Heavenly Jerusalem which descends from above, clothed in radiant jewels like a prefect bride. Central to the imagery of good and evil in Revelations, these urban metaphors gave Apocalyptic anxieties special resonance in the psyches of fifteenth-century urban audiences, especially in the major commercial centers like Florence and Nuremberg.
Other developments in the late Middle Ages contributed to the rise in Apocalyptic anxiety in the fifteenth century. The recurrent plagues which followed in the wake of the great Black Death of 1348offered troubling signs of human guilt and divine wrath. Even more important was the rapid expansion of the Ottoman Turkish empire after 1375. By the mid-fifteenth century, all of the Holy Lands had fallen under Islamic rule. The dramatic collapse of Constantinople in 1453 ended a thousand-year old Byzantine empire, the longest in Western history. As Turkish armies swept through Greece into the Balkans, moving rapidly from one victory to the next, panic swept Christian Europe. For the next two centuries, the Turk was compared tothe Apocalyptic beast which scourged the earth in the final days or to the Satanic dragon vanquished by the Archangel Michael.Dürer gave voice to these anti-Turkish fears in the opening woodcut of his Apocalypse in the Martyrdom of St. John the Evangelist. Although executed by the Roman emperor, Domitian, Dürer showed Domitian as a bloodthirsty Turkish despot in line with contemporary European practice representing all famous tyrants and evil-doers as Turks. Indeed, Dürer designed six woodcuts between 1496 and 1500 which depicted Christ’s tormentors (soldiers, Pilate, Caiphas)as modern Turks. [1]
Late fifteenth-century Apocalyptic anxieties also responded to three more problems of the day. First, there was the threat of heresy as growing urban populations and humanist print culture allowed a critical mass of educated urban populations to reconsider religious traditions and take matters into their own hands. Second, the longstanding corruption of the church, already badly weakened with the Great Schism of the early fifteenth century, reached a new zenith with the election of Rodrigo Borgia as Alexander VI (1492-1503). When the Vaticanhad become a haven for courtesans, it was easy to denounce this pope as the Anti-Christ foretold in Revelations. Third, the French invasion of Italy in the early 1490s seemed to spell final doom for the Roman Church.
All of these developments allowed normal Christian anxiety about death and Last Judgment to reach a new level in the 1490s, especially in the larger towns where monastic preaching and penitential hysteria fed off each other. These were the years when Savonarola attracted huge crowds with his doomsday sermons in Florence and when Signorelli painted a large cycle of frescoes on the Apocalypse in the cathedral of Orvieto.(Although the world did not come to an end on Jan 1, 1500, religious, political, and social problems continued to fuel Apocalyptic worries in the years before and after the Reformation (1518-) when the Catholic church splintered into a violent and chaotic world of conflicting sects.
Mass Fears – Mass Media
Invented in the mid-fifteenth century, printing expanded rapidly in the next five decades. By 1500, more printed books were circulating than had ever been produced beforehand. The cultural revolution of printing allowed ambitious individuals the chance to emerge as independent voices and to pursue spiritual authority, intellectual prestige, and fame outside the traditional centers of medieval learning such as monasteries and cathedral schools (universities). By the same token, the newtechnology of printed images, available since the early fifteenth century but exploding after 1450, allowed ambitious artists a new way to reach wide audiences directly, independent of the guild and patronage systems, and to emerge as famous authors in their own right.
While pursuing fame and fortune in the world of prints, Dürer combined printed books and images in new and interesting ways. Since 1470, publishers had used woodblocks to include small illustrations in printed books. And in the case of one book, a popular manual on dying well, full-size size illustrations were included to mark the beginning of chapters. Inspired, perhaps, by this example, Dürer did something no artist had ever done before and few would do afterwards until the nineteenth century. He designed and published a printed book on a major topic of the day and published it in Latin and German editions.By the late fifteenth century, the most popular printed books were Bibles, devotional handbooks, biographies of the saints, lives of Christ and Mary, and a few, new secular books such as Brant’s Ship of Fools. Turning to the Bible, Dürer picked Revelations as the perfect book to publish and illustrate in 1498. It was also a subject well suited to his new naturalism which was both carefully studied from life yet capable of a higher, visionary seeing like that found in Revelations itself, a series of visions written down by St. John the Evangelist.
Dürer’s Apocalypse as Urban Vernacular/Visual Vernacular
The world of printed books and images was profoundly urban and aimed itself at the new, rapidly expanding audience for books in the city vs. the traditional audience in monastery, cathedral university, and in isolated castles. To reach a larger audience, printed books were frequently illustrated after 1470. In part, this imitatedthe more prestigious world of hand-written, hand-painted books (manuscripts) but it also helped market the new printed books to a larger mass audience of urban readers. At a time when most printed books were still written in Latin and when printed illustrations were small and subordinated to the more important text, printed images helped translate written words into a more comprehensible “vernacular” of visual language. Dürer clearly had this in mind by making so many woodcuts for his book and by making them full-page in size. With sixteen pages of woodcut facing sixteen pages of text, Dürer’s Apocalypse went farther than any earlier book in translating the high world of Latin (and the lower world of German) text into compelling “vernacular” of horrifying images.
Seen in linguistic terms as a vernacular, Dürer’s artistry also surpassed anything seen in earlier Northern prints in so far as his woodcuts were carefully studied from life with drawings and watercolors. This allowed him to transform painting and printmaking with new truth, power, and visual interest. In the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Dürer used this understanding of nature to endow his visionary subject with a vivid, even terrifying sense of reality not found in earlier prints or manuscript paintings ofRevelations. Here Renaissance naturalism showed its superior power in the world of medieval vision, going far beyond the flat, timeless, disembodied aesthetic of earlier representations.
In Dürer's woodcut, the ground plane below and clouds above appear as fragments of a coherent, naturalistic world which has disintegrated into a terrifying chaos. The horsemen of death ride through this confusion mowing everyone down while the traditional jaws of hell swallow all mankind at lower left. No one is spared, from bishops to peasants. In another woodcut from Dürer's Apocalypse, a quiet German landscape hosts a celestial battle between angels and satanic beasts. The landscape and imaginary figures are both described with the same convincing new naturalism seen elsewhere in the book. Given the common prediction that such events would soon appear in German skies, Dürer's print with its dichotomy of natural and supernatural played brilliantly off popular fears.
The Artist as Visionary Seer-Author
Although inspired by the Biblical text which accompanies them, Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcuts were also independent of the text in some important ways. Their number, large size, layout facing a page of text, and new artistic power allowed them to claim equal status to the hitherto superior world of the written word. Indeed, the Latin text which few could read was for the first time supplementary to the “illustrations”. Even the German edition was of interest primarily for its images. That Dürer was ambitious enough to believe his pictures could rival, even surpass literature suggests the new Renaissance idea of the artist as a creative thinker, working not with his hands like an anonymous craftsman but with his mind. Here was an author whose visual “text” rose to the higher realm of “godlike” or “noble” mind. Here the craftsman dared to appear as a translator, and thus an author, of Scripture.
Even Northern European audiences unfamiliar with new Italian Renaissance ideas of the artist as thinker or author would have understood this notion as they turned the pages of Dürer’s Apocalypse. For surely its most admirable and striking feature was the visionary power of its images.[2] However much they referred to the Biblical text, they also functioned as Dürer’s unique visions, his four horses, his mouth of hell, his rain of blood, his Whore of Babylon. By displaying the artist’s powers of visionary seeing, the book established an implicit comparison between Dürer and John the Evangelist, whose visions the artist so self-consciously depicted.
This was particularly apparent in the Vision of God with the Seven Candleswhere John kneltin the lower foreground with his back to the viewer. In part, John served as a humble surrogate for the real viewer who was invited to see and kneel and tremble along with the saint. But the kneeling John also offereda version of the artist himself whose vision the real beholder witnessed. The woodcut also quietly celebratedits own scope by making John’s revelation a subordinate element in Dürer’s vision.
The artist compared himself even more closely to John in the later frontispiece designed for the 1511 edition of the Apocalypse. Here John appeared in such proximity to the Apocalyptic Madonna that both Mary and Christ were able to look back and see him. Although much of their gaze works to express their interceding, salvational love, theirintensely radiant, responsive gaze at John also works to refocus some of the print’s visual emphasis on the writer, and, by implication, on the artist. To be sure, John appears as a dutiful evangelist, writing down the subject of his hope-filled vision. But placed in such close proximity to his subject, he also resembles an artist painting a portrait. Conversely, the Madonna and Child look as if they are posing for their picture. And on one level, this is what is happening because this is precisely what we see when we look at this print: Durer’s portrait of the Apocalyptic Madonna. St John can scribble anything he wants but the viewer is busy admiring the artistry of Albrecht Dürer.
To underscore his artistryexplicitly in all but one of the sixteen woodcuts of the Apocalypse, Dürer included his large monogram in the perfect, symmetrical center of the lower margin. In seven of the woodcuts, the monogram balances perfectly with the equally central and symmetrical image of God at the top of the image. If God ruled over the cosmos and the end of the world, Dürer’s divinely symmetrical monogram quietly proclaimed his own god-like rule over the universe of the printed image. In a quiet gesture not unlike those see in Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling (1508-12) and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1517), Dürer hailed God’s awesome power in part to assert the all-encompassing, all-seeing, all-creating world of his own, distinctly Renaissance artistry. Despite its ostensible humility at the lower margin (like his self-portrait at the bottom of the Holy Trinity altar), Dürer’s logo proudly displays his divine intellect. Interestingly, Dürer shifted his monogram off center in only one woodcut, the Vision of God with the Seven Candles. Moved slightly to the left, the logo aligneditself with the kneeling John nearbyas if to underscore the many comparisons made between the artist and his Scriptural counterpart in the world of terrifying visions.
Medieval Apocalypse as Renaissance Wealth and Fame
The Book of Revelations wasDürer’s first great success as an artist and an art dealer selling his own work. This success depended on timing, subject matter, artistic innovation, marketing diligence, and success in exploiting the power of two new media: printed books and printed images. Unlike Botticelli’s Apocalyptic paintings made for private patrons or the fresco cycles on the Apocalypse scattered in select churches around Europe, Dürer's woodcut Apocalypsewas printed in thousands of copies whose small size and portability allowed them to reach tens of thousands of viewers within a few years and hundreds of thousands of viewers by the time of his death. (In 1511, he reissued his book, capitalizing on a new generation of collectors at a time when many still thought the world was about to end.)
One delicious irony of the work’s success was that it brought wealth to the artist even as it depicted the destruction of all wealth and the punishment of greed allegorized by the Whore of Babylon. We can better understand Dürer’s Apocalypseas a Renaissance work of art if we compare the subject of the book with the purpose, impact, and appeal of the printed book itself. Coming at the end of the Bible, Revelations offered horrific descriptions of the end of worldly time, the final battle between heavenly and demonic forces, and the divine destruction of all powerful rulers, corrupt aristocrats, and wealthy merchants. In subject, Revelations suggested Biblical and medieval ideas on the vanity of all earthly accomplishment and the final destruction of worldly ambitions and wealth. It also imaged the corporate piety of the Middle Ages with its large crowds of sinners and saved. No wonder it was popular in monastic piety, urban sermons, and church art, along with other Apocalyptic subjects such as the Last Judgment.