Scholars Mind

Painting the End of the World

The four horsemen of the apocalypse, fires raging across more than California: the Book of Revelation has long offered artists a rich source of imagery for the end of the world. As you explore the following works from the European Renaissance, ask yourself: how does each artist distinguish between the destinations of the saved and the doomed—and is their tone one of terror or acceptance?

Skeletons herd the living into a coffin; a sky splits open as four riders trample the earth. Europe's greatest painters spent a century picturing the last day.

Every work — at a glance

  • The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Albrecht Dürer (painting)

    Dürer's famous 1498 woodcut from his Apocalypse series, depicting Conquest, War, Famine, and Death charging together out of the Book of Revelation, trampling humanity beneath their galloping horses in a whirlwind of dynamic line.

+ 18 more works explained inside

What to know

  1. 01
    How does each divide the saved from the damned? By composition, not caption. In The Last Judgment Michelangelo splits the wall into a rising column of the blessed and a falling mass of the doomed, sorted by Christ's raised and lowered hands. In The Mystical Nativity Botticelli circles angels in the sky, has angels embrace people on the ground, and sends small devils fleeing into cracks below. Dürer and Bruegel refuse the split: in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse the riders trample everyone and even a bishop falls into a hellmouth, and in The Triumph of Death king and peasant lose alike, which is its horror.

+ 1 more insight inside

Across subjects

Every one of these images illustrates a single LITERARY text — the Book of Revelation, the most image-dense book of the Bible. Its author wrote in cinematic

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

On these walls the question becomes 'what waits at the very end?' — and the answer is always a fork: paradise or the pit. Does terrifying people about the end make them better, or just more afraid? These works were painted to frighten viewers into virtue, yet the same imagery can harden into fatalism.

Practice — a sample

ARTA patron wanting an end that still leaves somebody saved would LEAST likely admire —

  • A The Last Judgment
  • B The Mystical Nativity
  • C The Triumph of Death
  • D The Four Horsemen
  • E Cole's burning city

Sign in to answer and see why each option is right or wrong.

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