Revelation has long been accepted as a text that presents unique interpretative challenges. Jerome (d. 420 CE) observed that ‘manifold meanings lie hidden in its every word’ (Letter 53: 9). A millennium afterwards, Martin Luther was initially sceptical about its value, claiming that it was ‘neither apostolic nor prophetic’, and even that ‘Christ is neither taught nor known in it’ (Luther 1522: 398). Only later did he relax his stance, suggesting that one ‘ought to read this book…with other eyes than those of reason’ (Luther 1530: 410).  

In many respects it is a book that defies logic. But then, logic is part of the structures of normal, everyday human experience, and the sudden, visionary appearance on earth of heavenly truths often requires the overturning of such structures. The reader is, therefore, invited on an interpretative journey through metaphor, allusion, and subtle negotiations of possible meaning. Christopher Rowland notes that Tyconius, writing in the same period as Jerome, saw Revelation as ‘having a contemporary application to the life of Christians living in the midst of ambiguity’ (Rowland 2016: 6). That is just the condition in which so many find themselves today, especially as more and more people fear for the future of the planet.  

There is ambiguity, too, about the authorship of the commentary whose words appear alongside the biblical text in the Getty Apocalypse. It is usually attributed to Berengaudus, an obscure figure thought to have lived in either the ninth or eleventh century.  

Berengaudus follows one of the most common interpretations of the ‘open door’ in Heaven (4:1): that it represents Jesus himself, in line with John 10:9, ‘ I am the door’. The anonymous illuminator seems to use this idea, and the door becomes a ‘viewfinder’, which thus accentuates the point that we are witnessing a vision. Berengaudus interprets the rainbow as representing ‘the Church, which surrounds us with its mercy,’ and ‘protects, governs, and defends us against invisible enemies’ (Morgan 2012: 41).  

Two of the three artworks here, like the text itself, can be described as ‘insular’, whether because they explore what it is to feel threatened in a small space, or because they communicate insights that have been arrived at in places relatively cut off from the rest of the world.  

The traditional location of John’s Revelation was the island of Patmos, while the Getty Apocalypse was created in Britain, which, at the time the book was illuminated, was on the island fringes of European civilisation.

Elisabeth Frink grew up on the same island, at a time when the future of the world was very much in doubt. She made her name in the aftermath of the Second World War, and during the complex peace which followed. With the conclusion of the conflict through nuclear destruction, it was now clear that humankind had the ability to destroy itself and bring about the end of humanity even without divine intervention. Growing up on an island that had once commanded a global empire and was now watching it dwindle, her tortured figures and angular forms were associated by some with a contemporary style which Herbert Read dubbed ‘the geometry of fear’ (Spalding 2013: 13).  

Gabriel Dawe might appear to be an exception. He grew up in Mexico and now lives and works in the United States—neither of which is particularly ‘insular’. However, his concerns are with our interconnectedness across the globe, which, in the age of space exploration increasingly came to seem like an island itself—tiny compared with the size of the galaxy as a whole, though providentially at the right distance from the sun to support life. His revelation of the laws underlying the natural order, of our connectedness one to another and to our wider environment, reminds us of our responsibility to ourselves and to the world around us. 

Writing about colour field painting (and specifically Richard Anuszkiewicz’s Rocket Red Apex, 1969), Dawe remarks on how the scale of such painting ‘[elicits] a trance-like state’:

It is futile to resist, and it would be foolish to try to make sense of it with the mind. (Dawe, 2019)

Even if there is a certain logic underlying its construction, his own work invites a similar response. Coincidentally, he thus echoes Luther’s opinion about Revelation. 

The Getty Apocalypse shows us John witnessing to his revelations, Frink’s Eagle Lectern bears the Bible which witnesses to God’s Word, while Dawe’s Plexus A1 gives us the chance to witness something for ourselves, and to find a sense of community in the process.

There is positive hope in this last event of witness which suggests that all is not—yet—lost. Perhaps in its own way it chimes with Revelation 4’s vision of the second coming of Christ, in which the end is revealed as a new beginning. 

References 

Dawe, Gabriel. 2019. ‘Experiencing Color Field Art’, in Seeing America: The Arc of Abstraction, by Tricia Laughlin Bloom (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum) 

Luther, Martin. 1960 [1522]. ‘Preface to the Revelation of St John [1]’, in Luther’s Works, vol. 35, ed. by E. Theodore Bachman (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press), pp. 398–99

______. 1960 [1530]. ‘Preface to the Revelation of St John [2]’, in Luther’s Works, vol. 35, ed. by E. Theodore Bachman (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press), pp. 399–411

Morgan, Nigel. 2012. Illuminating the End of Time: The Getty Apocalypse Manuscript (Los Angeles: Getty Publications)

Rowland, Christopher. 2016. ‘The Reception of the Book of Revelation, An Overview’, in The Book of Revelation and its Interpreters: Short Studies and an Annotated Bibliography, ed. by Ian Boxall and Richard N. Tresley (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 1–25 

Schaff, Philip (ed.), W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis, and W.G. Martley (trans.). 1893. The Letters of St Jerome, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2, vol. 6 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.)

Spalding, Julian. 2013. ‘Frink: Catching the Nature of Life’, in Elisabeth Frink: catalogue raisonné of sculpture 1947–93, ed. by Annette Ratuszniak (London: Lund Humphries), pp. 9–23