Adoration of Christ; Wedding of the Lamb; Angel calling birds; Fight against the beast; The beast and the false prophet in the fire, from The Flemish Apocalypse (Apocalipsis in dietsch), 1401–1500, Illuminated manuscript, 340 x 250 mm, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Paris, MS Néerlandais 3, fol. 22r, Bibliothèque nationale de France ark:/12148/btv1b10532634z
These three artworks, spanning a time period of over six hundred years, are all taken from Apocalypse cycles. That is, each is part of a rendering of the whole text of Revelation. The Flemish Apocalypse takes a more narrative approach to the source-text, while Max Beckmann focuses in on a few discrete verses from various chapters, and Irene Barberis juxtaposes her own visualizations of elements of Revelation’s text with inherited historical images.
Interestingly, for two images produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both Beckmann and Barberis retain the very text of Revelation as an integral part of their work. Similarly, in The Flemish Apocalypse, each of the twenty-two images appears opposite the corresponding chapter of text.
However, the relationship between text and image differs in each case. The Flemish image serves more as a straightforward illustration of Scripture. This is less a visual commentary and more a visual parallel, with hardly any textual detail left un-visualized, no matter how awkward the result. Such ‘compressed’ visual narrative does nevertheless give rise to an exegetical question, in that it gives the viewer the opportunity to reflect upon the different aspects of Jesus Christ that John presents us with in Revelation (the Lamb, the messianic figure, and the conflation with God the Father). In this image, all three aspects of Christ are unabashedly placed side by side. They are perhaps necessary counterparts to one another, although it is worth noting that it is the Lamb alone who is depicted in the final image of the Flemish series, the New Jerusalem, thus indicating an ultimately privileged position for this figure.
In contrast, Beckmann prioritises particular aspects of the final verses of Revelation 19, and possibly just 19:21. Although the Rider, his horse, and the birds are striking figures, their victims (especially the possible Whore of Babylon figure) are equally visually arresting. Beckmann identified himself with John the seer and also with Revelation’s victims to explore the human cost of Armageddon—something only implied by the text itself—and to further his long-standing critique of the futility of war. In many ways this series therefore represents a questioning—welcome for some—of the rigid certainties of Revelation, with its ‘black and white’ view of the world and of good and evil. Similarly, if the figure at the front of the image is to be interpreted as the Whore of Babylon, then Beckmann is also encouraging us to consider (as some feminist critics of Revelation have done) whether she is as much a victim as a beneficiary of the ‘Beasts’ (she is said to be destroyed by them in Revelation 17:16). Once again, Beckmann appears to be ‘complicating’ Revelation in ways that will be embraced by some and which others will find troubling.
Barberis offers something different again. Although in a very different medium, her work is like the fourteenth-century Angers Apocalypse Tapestry, in that it must be experienced physically, by walking alongside its three-metre-high panels. The experience is less one of intense contemplation in which one is drawn deeply into one image at a time (as with the Flemish and Beckmann images) and more one of full-body immersion in the narrative and themes of Revelation, a sensation compounded by Barberis’s use of different types of light during the viewing experience. Thus, one is asked to consider not just the Rider on the White Horse, here depicted mainly as the White Horse, but how this figure fits within the overall narrative of Revelation. Just as the rendering of Sandro Botticelli’s Gabriel functions in this panel as a forerunner to the White Horse, so the Horse is presented as a necessary forerunner to the New Jerusalem (shown in the final panel), trampling easily over its earthly opponents. Ultimately, it is not the Horse that matters but the reality for which it clears the way.
Just as the Rider himself has been ‘unseated’ by Barberis, so the force of the messianic figure motif (so prominent in the Flemish image) has been erased. Neither the White Horse nor the Rider are really the agents of the establishment of the New Jerusalem; they are merely symbols of its coming. As Barberis herself has said, her Horse and ephemeral Rider represent the breaking of the ‘division of the heavenly and the earthly’ (Barberis and Brown 2017). While in some ways Berberis’s tapestry represents a radical and highly personal reading of Revelation, in this sequence the agency is placed firmly back with God. Albeit in a very different, more provocative way, the deterministic character of Revelation brought out so forcefully in the Flemish images is upheld here too.
References
Barberis, Irene, and Michelle P. Brown. 2017. ‘Tapestry of Light: Intersections of Illumination’. Exhibition booklet.
Camille, Michael. 1992. ‘Visionary Perception and Images of the Apocalypse in the Later Middle Ages’, in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. by Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), pp. 276–89
Carey, Frances. 1999. The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (London: British Museum Press)
O’Hear, Natasha, and Anthony O’Hear. 2015. Picturing the Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in the Arts over Two Millennia (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
11 Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. 12His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed which no one knows but himself. 13He is clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. 14And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him on white horses. 15From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. 16On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, King of kings and Lord of lords.
17 Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly in midheaven, “Come, gather for the great supper of God, 18to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.” 19And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth with their armies gathered to make war against him who sits upon the horse and against his army. 20And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had worked the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulphur. 21And the rest were slain by the sword of him who sits upon the horse, the sword that issues from his mouth; and all the birds were gorged with their flesh.
Unknown artist
Adoration of Christ; Wedding of the Lamb; Angel calling birds; Fight against the beast; The beast and the false prophet in the fire, from The Flemish Apocalypse (Apocalipsis in dietsch), 1401–1500, Illuminated manuscript, 340 x 250 mm, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Paris, MS Néerlandais 3, fol. 22r, Bibliothèque nationale de France ark:/12148/btv1b10532634z
Irene Barberis
White Horse: And I Saw Heaven Opened (Panel 13), part of The Tapestry of Light, 2017, Tapestry, 304 x 408 cm, On a world tour, © Irene Barberis
Max Beckmann
The Apocalypse (Revelation 19:11–16), from Apokalypse, Executed 1941–42; published 1943, Coloured lithograph, 390 x 300 mm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gift of Mrs. Max Beckmann, 1984.64.66, © Max Beckmann Estate, Artist Rights Society, New York/VG Bid-Kunst, Bonn
Renderings of the Rider
These three artworks, spanning a time period of over six hundred years, are all taken from Apocalypse cycles. That is, each is part of a rendering of the whole text of Revelation. The Flemish Apocalypse takes a more narrative approach to the source-text, while Max Beckmann focuses in on a few discrete verses from various chapters, and Irene Barberis juxtaposes her own visualizations of elements of Revelation’s text with inherited historical images.
Interestingly, for two images produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both Beckmann and Barberis retain the very text of Revelation as an integral part of their work. Similarly, in The Flemish Apocalypse, each of the twenty-two images appears opposite the corresponding chapter of text.
However, the relationship between text and image differs in each case. The Flemish image serves more as a straightforward illustration of Scripture. This is less a visual commentary and more a visual parallel, with hardly any textual detail left un-visualized, no matter how awkward the result. Such ‘compressed’ visual narrative does nevertheless give rise to an exegetical question, in that it gives the viewer the opportunity to reflect upon the different aspects of Jesus Christ that John presents us with in Revelation (the Lamb, the messianic figure, and the conflation with God the Father). In this image, all three aspects of Christ are unabashedly placed side by side. They are perhaps necessary counterparts to one another, although it is worth noting that it is the Lamb alone who is depicted in the final image of the Flemish series, the New Jerusalem, thus indicating an ultimately privileged position for this figure.
In contrast, Beckmann prioritises particular aspects of the final verses of Revelation 19, and possibly just 19:21. Although the Rider, his horse, and the birds are striking figures, their victims (especially the possible Whore of Babylon figure) are equally visually arresting. Beckmann identified himself with John the seer and also with Revelation’s victims to explore the human cost of Armageddon—something only implied by the text itself—and to further his long-standing critique of the futility of war. In many ways this series therefore represents a questioning—welcome for some—of the rigid certainties of Revelation, with its ‘black and white’ view of the world and of good and evil. Similarly, if the figure at the front of the image is to be interpreted as the Whore of Babylon, then Beckmann is also encouraging us to consider (as some feminist critics of Revelation have done) whether she is as much a victim as a beneficiary of the ‘Beasts’ (she is said to be destroyed by them in Revelation 17:16). Once again, Beckmann appears to be ‘complicating’ Revelation in ways that will be embraced by some and which others will find troubling.
Barberis offers something different again. Although in a very different medium, her work is like the fourteenth-century Angers Apocalypse Tapestry, in that it must be experienced physically, by walking alongside its three-metre-high panels. The experience is less one of intense contemplation in which one is drawn deeply into one image at a time (as with the Flemish and Beckmann images) and more one of full-body immersion in the narrative and themes of Revelation, a sensation compounded by Barberis’s use of different types of light during the viewing experience. Thus, one is asked to consider not just the Rider on the White Horse, here depicted mainly as the White Horse, but how this figure fits within the overall narrative of Revelation. Just as the rendering of Sandro Botticelli’s Gabriel functions in this panel as a forerunner to the White Horse, so the Horse is presented as a necessary forerunner to the New Jerusalem (shown in the final panel), trampling easily over its earthly opponents. Ultimately, it is not the Horse that matters but the reality for which it clears the way.
Just as the Rider himself has been ‘unseated’ by Barberis, so the force of the messianic figure motif (so prominent in the Flemish image) has been erased. Neither the White Horse nor the Rider are really the agents of the establishment of the New Jerusalem; they are merely symbols of its coming. As Barberis herself has said, her Horse and ephemeral Rider represent the breaking of the ‘division of the heavenly and the earthly’ (Barberis and Brown 2017). While in some ways Berberis’s tapestry represents a radical and highly personal reading of Revelation, in this sequence the agency is placed firmly back with God. Albeit in a very different, more provocative way, the deterministic character of Revelation brought out so forcefully in the Flemish images is upheld here too.
References
Barberis, Irene, and Michelle P. Brown. 2017. ‘Tapestry of Light: Intersections of Illumination’. Exhibition booklet.
Camille, Michael. 1992. ‘Visionary Perception and Images of the Apocalypse in the Later Middle Ages’, in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. by Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), pp. 276–89
Carey, Frances. 1999. The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (London: British Museum Press)
O’Hear, Natasha, and Anthony O’Hear. 2015. Picturing the Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in the Arts over Two Millennia (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Revelation 19:11–21
Revised Standard Version
11 Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. 12His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed which no one knows but himself. 13He is clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. 14And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him on white horses. 15From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. 16On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, King of kings and Lord of lords.
17 Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly in midheaven, “Come, gather for the great supper of God, 18to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.” 19And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth with their armies gathered to make war against him who sits upon the horse and against his army. 20And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had worked the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulphur. 21And the rest were slain by the sword of him who sits upon the horse, the sword that issues from his mouth; and all the birds were gorged with their flesh.
More Exhibitions
Abram the Warlord
Genesis 14:1–17
The Whore of Babylon
Revelation 17
Ecce Homo
John 19:4–5