Horsemen Critical Review: The Four Term Paper

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Indeed, Durer's woodcut has become so famous that it may have influenced the tendency to see the first white horseman in a more negative than a positive light, underscoring the power and influence of representational Biblical art upon popular theology and the collective cultural religious imagination. Of course, the fact that the other horsemen are so negative in their apparent intentions towards humanity, as the second horseman, riding the red horse, seems to be representative of war, the third horseman on the black horse seems to spread famine, and the fourth horseman on the pale horse is explicitly named death, further contribute to the sense that collectively, all four figures are destructive.

In the print, three of the powerful riders on their white, red, and black horses gallop at the forefront of the work. The white horses' rider holds a bow and wears a medieval, peaked hat towards the background, the caped red horse's rider wields a sword, and nearest the foreground the black horse's rider is bareheaded, holding a scale. The skeletal horse with the skeletal man is evidently the pale horse's rider. The specificity of the artist illustrates that Durer knew the Biblical text's images quite intimately and wished to transcribe them in fairly accurate detail. However, the artist translates these images of war, pestilence, famine, and death into medieval terms of his own era -- the warrior's crown of the white horse's rider is clearly of the artist's age, as is the garb of the second rider, and the small metal scales held by the third are similar to that of a medieval apothecary, used in weighing grain with weights.

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The persons whom the riders dominate are also dressed in the clothing of peasants of Durer's own times, rather when the book was actually authored. Thus, like the work of so many artists, including the artists of our present day, Durer located his interpretation of the Book of Revelation not as a part of Middle Eastern history or theology particular to the era of the original text's authorship. The artist saw the text as a work to be reinterpreted for the artist's own age and times, in the contemporary terms of the work's likely audience. The end of days predicted is not in images of what would have been 'near' to the book's author, but what felt and seemed near to Durer himself, and to the woodprint's likely first gazers.

Theologically, the administration of God throughout the text of Revelation of the horsemen is conveyed in the woodcut, as an angel hovers overhead, watching the riders of the apocalypse go about their terrible bidding, underling the sense that the destruction is under the observation, if not direct control, of God. Thus, Durer's interpretation is not doctrinally unique or innovative so much in that it takes the common images of the language of the book and makes them vivid and real in comprehensible terms that still have iconic power today.

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