Painting the Apocalypse
For the uninitiated, the word apocalypse- apokalypsis- means revelation. In the words of the scholar of literary romanticism, M.H. Abrams, apocalypse is “a prophetic vision, set forth in arcane and elaborate symbols, of the imminent events which will bring an abrupt end to the present world order and replace it by a new and perfected condition of man and his milieu.”[1] Apocalypse is predominantly concerned with eschatology, i.e. the judgement of the divine in “the end of days” when a set of horrible disasters and violent events are visited upon the world followed by the appearance of a “Messianic redeemer” who ushers in a new realm and stops time. To many painters from the renaissance onwards, the imagery of the Book of Revelations furnished many ideas for pictures of fantastic beasts, events and symbols. In the romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, images from Revelations became combined with Edmund Burke’s ideas on the sublime set out in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. According to Morton D. Paley, it was a drawing by John Hamilton Mortimer of Death on a Pale Horse shown at the R.A. in 1775 which united this iconography of revelation with Burke’s notions of the sublime which introduced what he called the “apocalyptic sublime” a “mode that subsequently effloresced during the period of the French Revolution.”[2] According to Paley, this convention is to be found in the following artists: Benjamin West, P.J. Loutherbourg, William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, John Martin, Samuel Colman and Francis Danby.[3]
[1] M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, (Norton, 1971), 38
[2] Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, (Yale, 1986), 1.
[3] Ibid.
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