Forebears and Four Horses
An Essay
The Four Horsemen, of the Apocalypse, circa 1498 by Albrecht Dürer (left).
Adam and Eve, 1917 by Max Beckmann (right).
The works Four Horsemen, of the Apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer and Adam and Eve by Max Beckmann depict biblically-inspired scenes of life and death, betrayal and revelation. Dürer’s woodblock print completed around 1498 is one of fifteen in a series of such pieces showing scenes from the Book of Revelation; the “Four Horsemen” are personifications of death, war, famine, and the Antichrist – or plague or conquest depending on interpretation. These riders are attended by an angel of merciful instruction: “Hurt not the earth…till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.”1 In a complex and precise manner, Dürer communicates the foundational narrative of a detailed apocalyptic vison. Twentieth-century artist Max Beckmann returns to the beginning, as it were, and portrays the central figures of Christian cosmogony. Adam and Eve shows humanity’s mythological forebears in their primordial starkness. Beckmann’s use of drypoint achieves his aim, qua expressionist, of conveying an emotional sense of the chaos out of which creation is pulled by God and into which it is plunged by deceit – central ideas of the Genesis story.
Albrecht Dürer and Max Beckmann create striking visualizations of biblical scenes; the technique used by each artist in the making of their respective pieces corresponds to the conceptual content of the narrative subjects they seek to communicate, i.e., life, death, ambiguous beginnings, and arduous ends.
Revelation 7:3