Apocalypse Then
October 2012
An explosion of activity rips through a crowd of men and women. Their bodies fall and recoil in the face of an approaching storm, their features contort with fright and agony, their limbs flail; rocks smash into their faces, whipped from the earth by the gathering tempest.
Yet this advancing storm is not atmospheric but creatural: four figures on horseback descend on the stricken crowd, each carrying a weapon with which to dispense their distinct portion of carnage. This is Albrecht Dürer’s The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (c 1497-98), the title work of the National Gallery of Victoria’s current print exhibition Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster.
Entering the exhibition space, the visitor is met with a discreet display of neatly-framed prints and grand old books in glass cabinets. Everything is where and what it should be in this traditional museum hang; the visitor is cosseted in the quiet formality of a systematic experience, instructional wall text guiding them through the curatorial narrative. In other words, none of your topsy-turvy contemporary nonsense here.
Yet what awaits the viewer within the confines of this regimental display is anything but comfortable. These are works in which catastrophe, turmoil and ecstasy reign supreme. Taken from the climactic Book of Revelation (6:1-8), the subject of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a particular favourite with artists and theologians of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. The aforementioned woodcut by the Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer played a decisive role in breathing new life into this historic motif. Through his advancement of the print medium, Dürer lent immediacy and intensity to a subject that spoke directly to the public mindset of the time.
The period from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries was one of enormous upheaval, oftentimes verging on hysteria, in Continental Europe. As an instruction manual on what to expect when the end of the world rides into town (quite literally), the biblical passage of the Four Horsemen – and particularly Dürer’s dynamic portrayal – married perfectly with the realities of war, famine, plague, social revolution, and religious crises that characterised this period in history. In the years leading up to the half millennium of 1500, when Dürer published his 15 woodcut illustrations of the Book of Revelation displayed in this exhibition, there was a heady scent of apocalypse in the air.
In the NGV’s exhibition, the subject of the Four Horsemen serves primarily as a framework through which the curators present their display of European prints from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries; these horsemen personify Conquest, Famine, War and Death respectively. The works are drawn largely from the NGV’s own remarkable collection of Dürer prints, the majority of which were bought in 1956 after having been offered to the gallery en masse by the British collector Sir Thomas Barlow. The gallery’s own works are supplemented by prints from the University of Melbourne’s Baillieu Library and the State Library of Victoria.
The subjects of the works are many and varied, ranging from the apparent scourge of witchcraft during the late Middle Ages (as in Dürer’s pseudo-sexual depiction Witch riding backwards on a goat from c. 1500) to the intersection of science and superstition in instructional images of human anatomy and the cosmos. Dürer’s cartographic illustrations of the northern and southern celestial hemispheres from 1515 further demonstrate the artist’s incredible capacity for innovation; these were the first ever printed maps of the celestial domain.
While the title of the current exhibition emphasises the macabre and ominous storyline that runs through this contingent of Northern Renaissance prints, the exhibition itself instead alludes to the frequent intersection between a fear of apocalypse and a hope for utopia. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a time in which physical existence and established knowledge seemed increasingly fragile: plague haunted the streets, Christian doctrine was itself a moveable feast, and the earth revolved around the sun (well, from 1543 onwards). Yet this exhibition seems to present a historical narrative in which the resultant public unease is balanced by a delight in Aristotelian potential. What bright future (or glorious end) might both science and religion offer?
In contrast to the many grim and grisly images of Death presented in this exhibition are several satirical prints from 1525 made after Hans Holbein the Younger, in which Death features as a mischievous dispenser of social justice, condemning greediness and vanity wherever he goes. The sixteenth century saw the widespread fall of feudalism in Europe, a social context reflected in Holbein’s Humanist depictions. It thus seems appropriate that these prints belong to Melbourne’s public collections. With just a hint of mischief in my voice, I would propose that Sir Thomas Barlow is to be congratulated on providing his magnificent collection of Dürer prints to the NGV in 1956; fortuitous event indeed.
Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster shows at the NGV International, St. Kilda Rd, until January 28.
Suzanne Fraser is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
ngv.vic.gov.au
Image: MaÎtre François (illuminator); Office of the Dead: The Three Quick and the Three Dead; c. 1475–80; tempera, gold paint, gold leaf and brown and red inks on parchment; 17.8 x 12.6 cm (folio)