Text: The End of the World And I feel fine. The End of the World has haunted the artistic imagination for two millennia. Andrew Graham-Dixon rides out with the Four Horsemen, and wonders why they've stopped frightening us. THERE are times when the end of the world seems even more nigh than usual. Ends of centuries have a way of throwing up prophets of doom and other predictors of universal apocalypse - hellfire preachers who, taking out their dog-eared Bibles, turn with relish to that scariest of New Testament books, the Revelation of St John the Divine, also known as the Apocalypse: '... and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death... '... and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood... And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island, were moved out of their places.' The Revelation of St John has always been one of the most controversial books in the Bible, being the last to be given a place in the New Testament. Even after its inclusion there were those who feared its potentially inflammatory effect on men's minds - and history has proved them right on more than one occasion. The graphic language of the Apocalypse - composed at the end of the 1st century to bind Christian communities together against sectarianism from within and Roman persecution from without - has inspired artists for nearly 2,000 years and may be counted responsible for some of the most frightening images in the canon of Western art. 'The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things To Come', the latest in a succession of learned but vividly accessible exhibitions at the British Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings, is a thrilling and often disconcerting journey through the imagination of apocalypticists and millennarians from the Middle Ages to the present. Exhibitions such as this satisfy a typically modern, somewhat voyeuristic attitude to the idea that the End of the World is just around the corner. Despite the huge encouragement traditionally offered to eschatological mania by a calendrical number as big as 2000, the fact is that we no longer really believe in the ancient Judaeo-Christian notion of an absolute, sudden end to the world, unless we happen to be Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, or members of the Heaven's Gate sect of California - who in 1997, it may be remembered, put the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet together with an over-literal reading of the Apocalypse and committed mass suicide. But even though the vast majority of us cannot bring ourselves to have faith in the absolute ending we seem still to be nostalgically fascinated by those of our ancestors who held fast to such a belief. Looking at the images which they left behind them, strange and startling keepsakes of ancient fear and fervour, we find in them, perhaps, a palliative to our own comparatively anticlimactic attitude to the end of another 1,000 years. The artists of the Middle Ages made the first really ambitious attempts to represent the seemingly unrepresentable episodes described in the Book of Revelation. They squeezed the events of the final conflict, the end of the world and the universal reckoning within the confines of the illuminated manuscript. The Winchester Psalter, which dates from the mid-12th century, contains one of the most memorable pictures to survive from medieval England. An angel locks the door on hell, seen as a gaping monster within whose mouth the cramped and confined figures of the damned wriggle like bacilli under a microscope. The ingenious and energetic Frances Carey, who organised the British Museum's exhibition, believes that, 'After the great manuscript cycles of the Middle Ages, the defining moment in the development of the pictorial tradition was Durer's publication of his 15 Apocalypse woodcuts in 1498.' Carey is a specialist in prints, and possibly a little biased. There will be those who feel that Luca Signorelli's astonishingly violent, magnificently threatening frescoes in Orvieto cathedral - with their rainstorms of blood and their unforgettable depictions of the Antichrist, the beast with the number 666, as a sinister dark-eyed double of Jesus Christ himself - are equally strong contestants for the palm she awards to Durer. But there is no denying the power of the great German artist's woodcuts, and precisely because they were prints, seen by multitudes, it is probably fair to say that they succeeded in putting the fear of God into more people than any other images created before their time. Urged on by an avenging angel in the sky, Durer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse advance pitilessly on a crowd of stricken figures who stand for all of humanity. One of them is a king, his crowned head already half-swallowed up by the maw of hell - which Durer depicted as a kind of dragon-cum-dog. The politically subversive implications of Apocalypse contributed to its mass popularity. It was a subject well calculated to appeal to the disenfranchised and the poor, for, after all, at the end of the world, distinctions of rank and class cannot be said to count for very much. The Reformation sparked an explosion of apocalyptic imagery, as the terrors predicted in the Bible became steadily more entangled, in the minds of many people, with the actual events of their troubled time. The opposition between Protestant and Catholic could easily be made to seem like a realisation of St John's violent and powerfully ambiguous prophecies. Large numbers of Christian believers became convinced that the final conflict was on the point of being played out, and contemporary images encouraged them in their beliefs. The evil monsters that swarm through St John's vision, such as Antichrist and the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, were often given pope's mitres, while Catholic priests were cast as instruments of the devil. There is something more than a little chilling about such works of art, a virulent form of propaganda which must be held at least partly responsible for the massacre of some 23,000 Catholics by radical Lutherans during the sack of Rome in 1527. People are capable of extraordinary atrocities when they believe their enemies really are the followers of the Antichrist. The post-Renaissance period has seen the gradual secularisation of the biblical Apocalypse. The ancient imagery survives, but put to new uses. During the late 18th century the cartoonist James Gillray adapted apocalyptical imagery as an instrument of scabrous satire, so that in his Presages of the Millennium we find William Pitt as Death on a pale horse, having his bottom kissed by a diminutive Prince of Wales. Gillray's contemporary William Blake recast the imagery of Apocalypse within the terms of his own mythology, connecting it both with the momentous political events of his time, such as the French Revolution, and also making its stories types or symbols of every individual's struggle for redemption. The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun is one of the most memorable of his apocalyptical designs. Indeed, the anti-hero of Thomas Harris's novel Red Dragon, the psychopathic Francis Dolarhyde, found the image so memorable that he broke into the National Gallery of Washington, stole the picture and then ate it ('a bizarre variation on Dürer's image of St John consuming the book,' comments the learned Frances Carey, who has borrowed Blake's picture for her exhibition). The best known English apocalypses probably remain the large 19th-century canvases by John Martin in the Tate Gallery, those exhilarating depictions of rack and ruin which, for all their vastness of scope, still seem endearingly Victorian creations: as the world buckles in on itself, as cities crack and crumble and a red sky covers all, the eye just manages to make out the London to Manchester express plunging into the abyss. Martin was well aware of the fascination which the Book of Revelation continued to exert (his brother, Jonathan, burned down half of York Minster in a fit of insanity brought on by reading it). But he seems more drawn to it as the pretext for great spectacle than as an opportunity to meditate on the revelation of God's purposes. His pictures visually anticipate the cinema (Cecil B DeMille liked them greatly) and they seem to anticipate certain 20th-century attitudes too. The apocalypse appeals as a theme - particularly, it would seem, to film-makers - because it offers such a good opportunity to revel in the frisson of violence and mass destruction. There are good reasons (perhaps that should be bad reasons) why the biblical Apocalypse holds so much less sway over all our imaginations nowadays. 'The horror, the horror,' Brando slurs in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, quoting Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. We have become so familiar with atrocity, each new year seeming to bring a new one, that it is hard indeed for us to imagine that any single event of our time is about to usher in the end of all things. So many terrible things, so many things that should have ushered in the end of the world, if anything was going to, have already happened - and yet here we all still are. Perhaps the literary scholar Frank Kermode is right, and modern man has finally given up on the ancient idea that time has a limit or edge. Writing about the current general inability to believe in the earthshattering significance of dates like 2000, even as it tick-tocks so quickly towards us, he speculates that 'there may recently have dawned a new sense that transition is endless, that it has in fact turned into an epoch or age, with nothing on the temporal horizon but more of the same, more transition.' Which is, perhaps, why the images of a Dürer still hold such a strong fascination. They are the visions of a terror we can no longer feel, borne out of a sense of conviction we sneakingly envy. * 'The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things To Come' is at the British Museum, London WC1 (0207-323 8599), until 24 April 2000. * 'The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things To Come' (British Museum Press, £25), by Frances Carey, is available from our retail partner, Amazon. The London Telegraph, Dec. 31, 1999

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