“The Four Horseman of The Apocalypse (Durer) and The Fall of Berlin”
The evocations and prophesies of the Apocalypse as foretold in The Book of Revelations of St John in The New Testament, were illustrated in fifteen woodcuts by Durer in 1498. Perhaps the most well known of which is the drawing of the Four Horseman of The Apocalypse. The Four Horseman represent Death, Famine, War and The Plague. The original print of 15” x 11” has been enlarged to 6 feet, all the white areas, areas that would have been the original cut parts in the woodcut, have been cut away by hand and the resulting solid black line drawing suspended over stained and faded imagery from Berlin in 1945.
After 500 years of Colonial exploitation and subjugation Europe finally turned the violence and destruction in on itself, the end result being the destruction of many of its’ cities. The shocking extent of the damage at the end of WW2 was most apparent in the German cities, where there had clearly been an Apocalypse that would equate with Biblical prophesy . The most iconic images of this Apocalypse that visited Germany were those of Berlin and Dresden, images that appear to signify the end of a way of life and the destruction of a civilization. A civilization that in its’ systemic destruction of particularly its’ Jewish population had essentially lobotomized itself.
