The Apocalypse, a vision for all times
Now that I have written about Albrecht Dürer’s Life of the Virgin, I became intrigued by another of his most famous works, the Apocalypse. I occasionally encounter woodcut prints from this series in exhibitions, and they have always struck me as unsettling and mysterious. Images of four horsemen, a book with seven seals, Babylon and its whore, the end of days, and the last judgement raise an obvious question: what is all this about?
It sounds dark and frightening, and in many ways it is. I learned that Dürer based his Apocalypse series on the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation. That discovery led me to ask who wrote this text and why it speaks in such extreme images.
What John records are visions revealed to him during his exile on Patmos, visions of catastrophe, judgement, but also renewal. Reading them today, it is striking how closely they echo our own time. Climate change, environmental destruction, authoritarian power, war, famine, and corruption all appear in the Book of Revelation. Born from exile and persecution, the text reads less like a theological work and more like a warning that continues to speak to the present.
I also discovered where Patmos is, a small Greek island at the far eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Now I find myself wanting to go there, to spend time in contemplation, and perhaps to recover a sense of hope in these dark and uncertain times.
Let’s start exploring.
Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse series consists of fifteen woodcut prints, published in 1498, just a few years before the year 1500, a moment charged with fear and expectation that many believed could mark the end of days foretold in the Book of Revelation. From this series, I will focus on four key images: John put in a pot of boiling oil, the Four Horsemen, the Whore of Babylon, and the Apocalyptic Woman.
Alongside Dürer’s prints, I will also include medieval Apocalypse manuscripts from the centuries before him. Images from these books were widely familiar in the Middle Ages, and Dürer clearly builds upon this tradition while transforming it through the power of print, which made such images available to a far wider public.
We begin by asking what the Book of Revelation is and who its author was, a figure known as John on Patmos. We will follow John’s path into exile and ask how and why he ended up on Patmos, far to the east in the Mediterranean Sea, where his visions were revealed.
- The Book of Revelation
- Why is John on Patmos?
- John’s visions
- The Four Horsemen
- The Whore of Babylon
- The Apocalyptic Woman and the Seven-Headed Dragon
- Closing notes
The Book of Revelation
The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament, written in the late first century by John of Patmos, traditionally identified with John the Evangelist. Composed as a series of visions revealed to its author, it describes the Apocalypse, from the Greek word ἀποκάλυψις, literally meaning “an uncovering” or “a lifting of the veil”, rather than the end of the world alone. The book’s name in Dutch is Openbaring.
John, exiled to the island of Patmos during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian, recounts a vision revealed to him by an angel and commanded to be made known. Written at the far eastern edge of the Roman Empire in the late first century and addressed to persecuted Christian communities, the text speaks in a language of terror and hope, warning and consolation.
Why is John on Patmos?
According to early Christian tradition, John was arrested during the reign of the emperor Domitian and brought to Rome, where he was condemned for his faith. Medieval sources recount that he was subjected to martyrdom by immersion in boiling oil, an ordeal from which he emerged unharmed, a sign of divine protection. Dürer’s print visualizes this moment of failed execution, emphasizing both the brutality of Roman authority and the impossibility of silencing the witness.
Unable to destroy him, the emperor instead ordered John into exile. He was banished to the small island of Patmos, at the far eastern edge of the Roman Empire, a place used for political and religious dissidents rather than common criminals. It is there, removed from centers of power yet still under imperial control, that John received the visions recorded in the Book of Revelation, transforming an act of punishment into a moment of revelation.
John’s visions
John’s vision begins with a throne set in heaven. In the hand of the one seated on the throne lies a sealed book, which only the lamb is worthy to open, the lamb being the symbol of Christ, slain and offered through his crucifixion. With the breaking of the seven seals, history itself is set in motion.
The opening of the seals unleashes four horsemen, bringers of conquest, war, famine, and death. Earthquakes follow, the sun is darkened, and the moon turns to blood. Trumpets sound, and the world is struck by fire, pestilence, darkness, and monstrous plagues. These are not random disasters, but signs of a world unraveling under tyranny, violence, and corruption.
Towards the end of the Book of Revelation, after disasters followed by judgment, comes renewal. Evil is bound, the dead are raised, and a new world is revealed, a luminous city of jasper walls and golden streets, where suffering has no place and history reaches its long promised end.
The Four Horsemen
In The Four Horsemen, the most famous woodcut from his Apocalypse series of 1498, Albrecht Dürer gives visual form to one of the most terrifying passages of the Book of Revelation. As the Lamb opens the first four seals of the sealed book, four riders are released upon the world, each mounted on a horse and entrusted with a destructive force that shapes human history.
Earlier illustrated Bibles often presented the horsemen as isolated figures or symbolic types. Dürer transforms the vision into an overwhelming surge of movement. The four horses and riders thunder diagonally across the image, compressed into a single, unstoppable wave that tramples everything beneath them. Death leads the charge, followed by Famine, War, and Conquest, their forms overlapping and interlocking so tightly that they appear as a single force rather than four separate agents.
Each rider carries a distinct attribute drawn from the biblical text. Number one bears a bow and crown, associated with conquest and domination. The second one raises a sword, bringing war and the collapse of peace. The third horseman holds a pair of scales, symbol of famine, scarcity, and economic imbalance. The final rider, Death, carries no emblem at all. His power is absolute and needs no sign. On Dürer’s woodblock print, human bodies are crushed beneath the horses, while a monstrous jaw gapes open to swallow the fallen (a bishop in particular), a reminder that violence, hunger, and disease spare no one.
The print does not present disaster as random or meaningless. The horsemen are released only after the seals are opened, suggesting that destruction follows from human history itself, from conquest, war, inequality, and the abuse of power. Seen today, the image still resonates. The forces Dürer visualized at the end of the fifteenth century remain disturbingly familiar, reminding us that the Apocalypse, in its original sense of revelation, is an unveiling of patterns that repeat across time.
The Whore of Babylon
In the Whore of Babylon, Albrecht Dürer gives visual form to a disturbing and politically charged vision in the Book of Revelation. John describes a woman seated upon a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns, adorned in luxury and holding a golden cup, drunk with the blood of saints and martyrs. Behind her rises the doomed city of Babylon, already engulfed in flames, its destruction both imminent and deserved.
Dürer presents the whore as a figure of seductive authority. She sits confidently upon the multi headed beast. The golden goblet in her hand, an object of beauty and desire, contains corruption and violence. Her gaze is directed toward a group of richly dressed figures who look upon her with fascination and submission, while an armed multitude advances from above, suggesting the reach and complicity of worldly power.
The seven headed beast beneath her recalls the dragon of the Apocalyptic Woman (hereunder as Dürer’s next print), linking these beasts of evil into a single continuum of deception, domination, and abuse of authority. Babylon itself is not only a city but a system, a world built on excess, exploitation, and the commodification of human life. Its fall is mourned not by the innocent, but by kings and merchants whose wealth and influence depended upon it.
For Dürer’s contemporaries, his image spoke directly to anxieties about corrupt rulers, moral decay, and the entanglement of power, money, and violence. Seen today, the Whore of Babylon remains a haunting warning. It is a vision not of sudden catastrophe, but of a society undone by its own indulgence and indifference, a world that collapses precisely because it mistakes luxury and authority for justice and truth.
The Apocalyptic Woman and the Seven-Headed Dragon
In the Apocalyptic Woman and the Seven-Headed Dragon, Albrecht Dürer visualizes one of the most complex and symbol laden passages of the Book of Revelation. John describes a woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars upon her head. Before her stands a monstrous dragon with seven heads and ten horns, waiting to devour her. A child is saved and taken up to God, while the woman flees, protected yet pursued. The Woman is interpreted as Mary and the Child as Christ. The Seven-Headed Dragon represents Satan and evil. This image is a good versus evil struggle.
Dürer transforms this vision into a tightly compressed drama. The woman appears serene yet vulnerable, elevated above the earthly realm, while the dragon coils below her in violent agitation. Its multiple heads and gaping mouths embody chaos, deception, and oppressive power, often interpreted as an image of empire and tyranny. The contrast is stark: divine order and promise above, destructive force below. The print is emphasizing that the struggle between good and evil is ongoing and not yet settled.
For contemporary viewers around 1500, this image resonated deeply. It echoed fears of political corruption, religious conflict, and looming catastrophe, while also offering reassurance that evil, however terrifying, would not ultimately prevail. The Apocalyptic Woman stands as a figure of endurance and hope, a reminder that this Revelation is not only a vision of destruction, but also of preservation, resistance, and eventual renewal.
Closing Notes
The Book of Revelation was written in a world marked by imperial violence, religious persecution, forced movement of people, and the abuse of power by an authority that claimed absolute legitimacy. The book’s visions are not fantasies of destruction for their own sake, but acts of unveiling: a refusal to accept oppression as normal or inevitable.
When Albrecht Dürer published his Apocalypse in 1498, Europe stood on the threshold of the year 1500, a moment charged with apocalyptic expectation. War, plague, religious anxiety, and social unrest shaped how these images were read. Dürer’s woodcuts force the viewer to recognize violence, false authority, and human suffering as part of a recurring historical pattern rather than a singular catastrophe.
Seen from our own time, marked by war, displacement, environmental destruction, and the misuse of power, the Revelations once again feel uncomfortably close. Yet the book does not ask us to endure these conditions in silence while waiting for a promised end. Its ultimate vision of a renewed world serves as a standard against which the injustices of the present are exposed.
Revelation’s “happy ending” does not cancel the horrors that precede it. The images confront every age with the same question: whether we recognize Babylon while living within it, and whether we still dare to imagine a world made new.
