our orsemen: an introduction

VIII
1
he our orsemen: an introduction
JENNIFER SPINKS AND CHARLES ZIKA
One of the most iconic images to emerge from early modern Europe depicts
the Four Horsemen riding abreast and charging across a compacted space,
their steeds brutally trampling underfoot men and women from all stations of
life. Each horseman has surged into action upon the dramatic opening of the
first four of the seven seals described in the Book of Revelation by John on
Patmos: ‘And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it
were the noise of thunder … And I saw, and behold a white horse’.1 The most
vigorous of the horsemen swings a set of scales, animating the space: he rides
the black horse of Famine, while his companion with the sword rides the red
horse of War. A third horseman with a bow and arrow rides the white horse
that represents Conquest and lowest of the four, a skeletal, elderly figure, rides
the emaciated pale horse of Death, accompanied by Hell. 2 At the lower left
of the image, the hell mouth yawns wide to swallow up the trampled, broken
bodies; even the highest are not saved, for an emperor is closest to the mouth
and is about to be sucked into the depths.
This woodcut is part of a cycle of fifteen images in which the Nuremberg
artist Albrecht Dürer famously gave visual form to the final book of the New
Testament, the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse.3 Jumbled
landscapes inhabited by terrible monsters, frightened sinners, devout faithful, thunderous natural signs and inhuman, heavenly angels make up Dürer’s
Albrecht Dürer
series. Themes of violence and punishment run through many of the images,
The Four Horsemen of the
and the hell mouth appears as a terrifying reminder of the ultimate destination
Apocalypse, from The Apocalypse,
of the damned.
published 1498
woodcut
National Gallery of Victoria,
The biblical text unfolds as a series of visions experienced by John on the
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island of Patmos, recorded with hallucinatory clarity, repetitive intensity and
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Leading artists such as Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer raised the print to an art
(opposite above)
form by developing increasingly sophisticated design, cutting and printing
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techniques that saw the sixteenth century produce not only a mass of cheap
prints but also some of the most sophisticated images of the era. Printed works
Four riders of the Apocalypse c.1478
folio CCCCCLXXVII recto in Bible,
volume 2, Nuremberg: Anton
of art were commissioned by rulers and elites, who made use of the new
Koberger, 1483
medium to demonstrate their status as patrons of art and to convey messages
hand-coloured woodcut
about their power. Indeed, Dürer was highly entrepreneurial in his approach,
9
(illustration only)
State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
arranging for the sale of his prints at fairs and markets, giving them away to
obtain patronage and swapping them with other artists.10 Dürer was inventive in
(opposite below)
his business techniques as well as in his artistic work. He understood the scope
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and power of the print to reach wide audiences, create new markets, circulate
novel imagery, and give expression to changes in religious belief and practice.
Plague of locusts c.1478
folios XXXVI recto in Bible,
volume 1, Nuremberg: Anton
Koberger, 1483
A crucial part of this new culture revolved around the intersection of text and
image. While many people in this period could not read, texts were read out loud
in taverns and the market place, and the ideas expressed in both word and image
were debated, reshaped and passed on from one person to the next. Indeed,
printed materials became more affordable as the sixteenth century progressed.
Well-off artisans, skilled tradesmen and shopkeepers, not just rulers, patricians
and clergy, could buy pious or polemical printed materials and circulate them
in their households and workplaces. In these ways, prints became the furnace
for a growing level of discontent within Western Christendom that led to the
Reformation. Especially in German lands, printed pamphlets and broadsheets,
often with pointedly satirical or otherwise arresting images, represented the
main media through which religious and theological, as well as social and
political, ideas were debated.11
The vivid imagery and religious urgency of apocalyptic prophecies drawn
from contemporary bibles quickly became part of these debates at the turn
of the sixteenth century.12 For more than a millennium the Bible had provided
Christian Europe with a fundamental key to understanding and explaining
historical events and change. By the fifteenth century, greater emphasis was
being given to the Bible by reformers such as John Hus and John Wycliffe, and
this became even more the case for sixteenth-century reformers like Martin
hand-coloured woodcut
(illustration only)
State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
12
13
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The Triumph of Death c.1562
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid
Yet other new epidemics were even more lethal: typhus or ‘camp fever’ killed
thousands of soldiers during the Thirty Years War and the wars against the
Turks; and the English Sweat was a deadly fever that spread through much of
England and Wales in the first half of the sixteenth century.
In c.1562, at the beginning of the French wars of religion, the Flemish artist
Pieter Bruegel the Elder created an extraordinary painting called The Triumph of
Death, which depicted a blackened, fire-ravaged countryside, festooned with the
scaffolds and wheels of persecution, being laid waste by an army of skeletons,
spurred on by the mounted figure of Death scything a path through the ranks
of the living. In a very different etching by the Italian artist Stefano della Bella,
probably produced in about 1646, just before the end of the Thirty Years War,
a triumphant mounted figure of Death is once again depicted on a battlefield
(pp. 30–1).22 But this figure appears as if on military parade, performing an
exaggerated slow-motion trot among what the text reminds us are ‘mountains
of bodies’. In early modern Europe, disaster and death were everywhere,
omnipresent and ominous markers of the ticking clock of the Apocalypse.
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33
Such battle imagery and carnage assumed powerful pertinence during Dürer’s
(left)
Albrecht Dürer
the distinctive uniform of the German lansquenet or mercenary foot soldier:
lifetime. Rivalries among the newly established European monarchies of the
Albrecht Dürer
Five lansquenets and an
The Four Avenging Angels of the
oriental on horseback c.1495–96
slashed sleeves, feather-crested hat, leggings and travelling cloak. They wear
Euphrates from The Apocalypse,
whose increasingly disciplined infantry forces were cruelly reinforced by new,
engraving
published 1498
National Gallery of Victoria,
featuring pointed pikes and halberds or battleaxes. The men have the air of
ultimate weapons: the cannons and muskets of the ‘gunpowder revolution’.3
woodcut
Melbourne
bravado and invincibility sported by young soldiers before conflict. Into their
Artists, particularly printmakers, quickly responded with martial imagery;
National Gallery of Victoria,
sixteenth century fostered their creation of large, standing national armies,
some of it celebrated soldiers and their victories, but some also demonised
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battle swords and carry the projecting weapons of contemporary phalanxes,
space a mounted foreigner intrudes; his turban clearly marks him as a Turk
and as such a representative of the Muslim enemy, whose forces had been
indomitable enemy forces, particularly the Ottoman Turks. The Turks formed
(right)
advancing steadily across the Balkans and up the Danube since their con-
the sixteenth-century Muslim nemesis of European Christendom, especially
Albrecht Dürer
quest of Constantinople in 1453. The Turkish conflict would span the sixteenth
for its Germanic leadership under the Holy Roman Empire. Later, the inter-
St Michael Fighting the Dragon from
century: the most climactic event was the Empire’s successful defence against
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necine Thirty Years War within Europe (1618–48) generated widespread and
The Apocalypse, published 1498
woodcut
Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent’s personal siege of Vienna in 1529, which was
unprecedented civilian devastation, a crisis that provoked a visual response in
National Gallery of Victoria,
followed by the 1571 naval victory over the Turkish fleet at Lepanto.
the anti-war print cycle The miseries and misfortunes of war, 1633, by etcher
Melbourne
Jacques Callot.6
Another print by Dürer highlights the dangers of military life. His 1510 woodcut broadsheet, complete with his own poem, shows a confrontation between
Like so many new visual topics, this theme of soldiers and war was first
crystallised in a variety of prints by Dürer.7 One of his earliest engravings
(c.1495–96) shows five warriors standing proudly beside an Alpine lake in
a lansquenet and Death (p. 34). A variant of the traditional medieval theme of
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Yet by the mid seventeenth century the horrors and atrocities of warfare could
(above)
no longer be blamed on divine judgement, as in Dürer’s works, or on planetary
Jacques Callot
influence, as in de Passe’s engraving after de Vos. Instead, haunting images of
the Thirty Years War show the irresistible force of Death itself commanding
The peasants avenge themselves
pl. 17 from The miseries and
misfortunes of war 1633
the battlefield, as if in an update of the traditional late medieval Dance of Death
etching
that sweeps all mortals away. Stefano della Bella, working in France, depicted
National Gallery of Victoria,
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in c.1646–7 a monumental skeletal figure wearing a hat of lansquenet feathers
Melbourne
jauntily riding a pale, skeletal horse, an image redolent of Dürer but now di-
(opposite)
vorced from an overtly apocalyptic context (pp. 30–1). The rider moves across
Crispijn de Passe the Elder, engraver
a fiercely contested battlefield, where dense armies of skeletons eradicate all
after Maarten de Vos
opposition. War belongs to the macabre, as these verses intone: ‘Here Death
Mars from the series
The seven planets c.1600
triumphs among funerals; / Her most beautiful promenades are those places
engraving
of battles; / Her throne is affirmed by the fall of the dead; / In an instant by her
British Museum, London
skillful arms she changes / Fertile fields into rivers of blood / And the plains of
Mars into mountains of bodies.’ 35
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