Ride a Pale Horse.
“When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.” Revelations, 6:8.
The terrifying sight of Death represented by a crowned skeleton astride a ferocious white charger which tramples over everything and everybody originates in the Book of Revelations, the last Book of the New Testament. Death is the last of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who has been interpreted in a variety of ways: he could represent either Christ himself or the personification of Evil. Mortimer’s main source would have been Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving of the Four Horsemen, and possibly an etching by the seventeenth-century etcher, Stefano della Bella. To Paley, the sight of this dreadful apparition perfectly realizes the concept of the Burkean “sublime of terror” which would be used by a number of artists for different reasons. For example, the American painter Benjamin West would treat the subject as a huge battle scene with nods to Michelangelo and Rubens (above); whilist J.M.W. Turner in an unfinished, abstract oil in the Tate is thought to have used the subject to comment on the death of his father. Horses themselves would become part of the imagery of the sublime in nature with such subjects as Delacroix’s Horse struck by Lightning which was inspired by George Stubbs’s fearsome evocation of nature “red in tooth and claw,” A Lion Attacking a Horse.
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