Daniel’s Four Beasts

At first glance, it appears to be a poetic vision. The full moon hovers over a tranquil bay. We are standing on a rugged coastline, surrounded by romantic ruins. A lone pillar enveloped in ivy marks perhaps the ideal site for a nightly rendezvous of furtive lovers.

It is, however, a dystopia—the fifth of a quintet of paintings by the British-American artist Thomas Cole (1801–48), which expresses the idea of cyclical history, linked to times of the day and weather patterns. The first work in the series shows mist evaporating from the mountainsides around the bay at sunrise, unveiling a society of hunter-gatherers not unlike some of the Native Americans still roaming the North-American plains and forests in freedom at the time the painting was made. In the second painting, a Stonehenge-like complex has been raised by the water, the focal point of a pastoral society in mid-morning. The third canvas reveals high-noon in a glorious empire—a superlative version of ancient Rome with a triumphal parade crossing a monumental bridge amidst countless temples and fora. Disaster strikes in the fourth painting, where violent climate change and hostile invasion combine to wreck the grandeur. Our work, the fifth and last, depicts merely what remains after the population has been extinguished.

Cole painted the series as a warning for an American empire that was still nascent, with the 25th State (Arkansas) joining the Union in the year the series was completed. It is a secularized prophecy, separated from the biblical notion of the end of days evoked in Daniel 7. Yet, at a time when modern Americans, and indeed everyone in the Western world might wonder at which hour of Cole’s day we find ourselves (at bright noon or on the brink of the tea-time collapse?), its message is no less potent than when voiced by the prophet.

References

Atack, Carol. 2018. ‘The Art of Historical Development: Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire’, www.anachronismandantiquity.wordpress.com

One could be forgiven for thinking that this seventeenth-century painted panel looks like an intricate board game. Daniel’s Four Empires—four tiny enthroned figures in the bottom left corner—could be the characters players have to adopt at the start. Following the roll of the dice, their pieces would progress along the concentric circles with little scenes in the upper part of the panel, to reach the Virgin and Child enthroned in heaven in the centre; the menacing Last Judgement in the lower half of the work would be the ultimate pitfall to avoid.

In reality, this is a Greek Orthodox icon, probably painted for a monastery on Corfu. Its maker, Theodoros Poulakis (1622–92), was a refugee from the Ottoman conquest of Crete (1645–69). Trained among the famous icon painters of Crete, then a Venetian dominion, he left his hometown Chania when the Ottomans landed there in 1645 and spent the rest of his life in Venice and on the then-Venetian island of Corfu.

The scenes around the Virgin illustrate a hymn to the Virgin by John Damascene (c.675–749), which opens with the words ‘In Thee rejoiceth all creation…’; the top left quadrant of the outer circle shows the seven days of creation according to the book of Genesis. And as we have noted, the painter has also added the biblical vision of the end of all creation, the Last Judgement. In keeping with an Orthodox tradition that had emerged during the sixteenth century, this includes the four kingdoms that Daniel 7 predicted would precede the appearance of the Son of Man.

The fourth kingdom in Poulakis’s series—the Roman Empire—is represented by Constantine the Great, the founder of Constantinople, who had made Christianity the state religion. The implication is that the fourth empire had ended with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 and the time of the Kingdom of God was now. Venetian propaganda of the era projected the notion of the Kingdom of God defending itself against the onslaught of the Ottomans, and it is likely that Poulakis, too, intended his icon to be read in this vein.  

References

Chatzedakes, M. and E. Drakopoulou. 1987–97. Hellēnes zōgraphoi meta tēn halōsē: 1450–1830, me eisagōgē stēn historia tēs zōgraphikēs tēs epochēs, 2 vols (Athens: Kentro Neoellenikon Ereunon); on Poulakis: vol. 1, 94 and vol. 2, 304–17; on the icon: vol. 2, 308–09.

Debby, Nirit Ben-Aryeh. 2014. ‘Crusade Propaganda in Word and Image in Early Modern Italy: Niccolò Guidalotto’s Panorama of Constantinople’, Renaissance Quarterly, 67.2: 503–43, esp. 522–24

Like modern television producers, sixteenth-century Antwerp print makers were fond of stories that could be serialized. Serial subjects, such as the Four Seasons, the Five Senses, or the Seven Deadly Sins, guaranteed income from a market of collectors wont to covet the complete set.

It is no surprise, then, that print makers Maerten de Vos (1532–1603) and his engraver Adriaen Collaert (c.1560–1618) seized upon Daniel’s vision of the four beasts, with its attractive connotation of a chronological succession of four great empires known from biblical and classical history.

Their series of four engravings portrays Ninus as the founder of the Babylonian Empire, Cyrus as the founder of the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great as the founder of the Greek Empire, and Julius Caesar as the founder of the Roman Empire. Each ruler is on horseback carrying a banner, with rulers two to four (Cyrus, Alexander, and Julius Caesar) trampling the preceding defeated empire beneath them. Each appears against a backdrop with, on one side, a magnificent city, representing their empire and, on the other, one of the beasts from Daniel’s vision, emerging from the sea.

The image selected here is the third from the series, representing Alexander the Great. The Greek conqueror rides his favourite horse, Bucephalus; the artists show themselves aware of the meaning of the animal’s name, ‘bovine head’, rendering the horse with a distinctly cow-like face. To the left, we see the third of Daniel’s monsters, the leopard with four wings and four heads (clever exegesis linked the number four to the fact that Alexander’s empire was divided into four parts after his death). The city that represents Alexander’s empire on the right is built on hills and dominated by a great domed church; it seems to owe more to how the print makers may have envisaged Rome rather than to authentic Hellenistic architecture. Undoubtedly, however, collectors eagerly gathering the series would have taken delight in the wealth of detail that is on display.

References

Ann Diels, Ann. 2005/06The Collaert Dynasty, The New Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Woodcuts, and Engravings 1450–1700, Ouderkerk aan den Ijssel (Sound & Vision Publishers)