Ekphrasis is a term ancient rhetors used to describe a tool of persuasion by which they turned readers/listeners into ‘viewers’. Through vivid language, rhetors/authors animated their descriptions, drawing their audiences deep into the topics they declaimed upon, thereby awakening mental pictures and emotions designed to awaken audience participation.

The opening verses of Revelation are an example of ekphrasis. First person narration intensifies audience experience by having listeners see and hear with John’s eyes and ears. It takes them to Patmos to behold, with John, the Jesus who will come with clouds (1:7); with hair white as wool and snow; eyes ‘like a flame of fire’; feet of ‘burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace’; a voice ‘like the sound of many waters’; ‘a sharp two-edged sword’ extending from his mouth; his face ‘like the sun shining in full strength’ (vv.12–15). Vivid description aimed to fill John’s audience with awe.

Depicting the moment at which John turned to hear the voice speaking from behind him, Titian and his workshop’s Saint John on Patmos captures the drama which John’s ekphrasis conveys. Upturned hands simultaneously signify a traditional gesture of prayer and astonishment. John’s radically foreshortened body is positioned off centre, while viewers are placed beneath his unstably placed legs, giving them an unconventional perspective.

This expresses a key goal of Revelation, to challenge audiences with new ways of seeing the world. The one who was pierced, it tells its hearers, has freed them, making them a kingdom, priests, who join with John in adoration (vv.5–6). The paradox of Revelation is its acclamation that the one whom the Romans crucified in fact rules not only them, but all of creation, and brings abundance and healing to all (v.21), from alpha to omega, from start to finish and that he does this through his death. No wonder John is almost knocked off his feet!

Diego Velázquez’s painting, St John on Patmos, pulls us in a different direction. Revelation arrives in a different way here. Has an insight come that he is about to record? Is he imagining or really seeing a vision of the woman of Revelation 12? The artist has expended his energy on depicting John as a young man in contravention of iconographical tradition. Landscape and even the vision fade away as the artist draws our attention to John’s facial features, his clothing, his hand poised to write. Revelation can come in the way Titian depicts, but it also arrives through contemplation, quiet prayer, and reading. Such revelations may arrive slowly, gradually, in small steps, but they are no less dramatic. We can be moving along in one direction when we hear the lure of a voice speaking from behind us, and suddenly our course is reset. In the example of John, we may recognize the experience of embarking upon a journey whose ending is unknown. Nevertheless, John models belief in the promise that—come what may—the one who has slowly revealed himself is one who alone holds the keys of death and Hades. As difficult as life so often is, there is indeed nothing to fear (vv.17–18).

Or, are we dreaming? The illuminator of the Trinity Apocalypse has John fast asleep on the island of Patmos. Revelation becomes a set of dreamscapes. He thus numbers John amongst the Bible’s great dreamers—as well as anticipating those, like Martin Luther King, Jr, who will continue to dream with the Bible. The illuminated folio assists ekphrasis by making the text’s contents visible. It seeks to involve us; even to immerse us, as text becomes part of the vision and vision part of the text.

Whether in the inclusion of such illuminations alongside the text of Revelation, or the addition of supplementary commentary like that of Berengaudus (as here), or the emendations of later copyists (also discernible in this folio), these manuscripts reveal themselves to be dynamic phenomena which are more than the sum of their parts.

This is a graphic example of Roland Barthes’ insight that ‘the author is dead’ (Barthes 1977), namely, that texts once composed require readers to bring them to life and discover things the author did not perhaps mean or even imply. Every act of interpretation adds something more to John’s initial vision. Applying Barthes’ insights to the Trinity Apocalypse illuminator’s depiction of John as asleep and dreaming, together with Berengaudus we become dream interpreters. As he does, we apply the words to our lives and so revision ourselves and the world around us.

In that case, it is not only John who is on Patmos; we are there as well, as we turn to look at the one who addresses us with the promise of eternal life.  

References

Allen, Garrick V. 2020. Manuscripts of the Book of Revelation: New Philology, Paratexts, Reception (Oxford: OUP)

Barthes, Roland. 1977. ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana)

Whitaker, Robyn J. 2015. Ekphrasis, Vision, and Persuasion in the Book of Revelation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck)