The Four Horsemen

Dürer printed the Apocalypse in 1498 and it made his name. What he did to this chapter is visible in one glance: he made the four riders a single charge. The chapter releases them one at a time, seal by seal: a white horse, a red, a black, a pale. Dürer sends them all at once, diagonally down the page from the upper right, so that the horses' legs and the riders' weapons make a single wave that breaks on the people underneath.

The order is the chapter's, read from the back of the charge to the front. Highest and furthest is the bowman, and there was a crown given him; Dürer gives him the crown and the drawn bow. Next the rider with the raised sword, to whom it was given that he should take peace from the earth. Then the rider with the pair of scales swinging from his fist. Lowest and nearest, on a starved horse whose ribs show, an old man with a trident: and behold a pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death. The chapter adds that hell followed him, and at the lower left Dürer draws hell as a mouth in the ground with teeth, swallowing a man in a bishop's mitre. Under the hooves lie a woman, a peasant and a burgher. Power was given to him over the four parts of the earth, the text says, and the four parts are on the ground.

Above the riders, at the top right, an angel flies in with its arms open. There is no angel in the sixth chapter at this point; there is the Lamb, who opens the seals, and the four living creatures round the throne, one of whom says Come and see. The angel is Dürer's way of saying that the charge was sent, that it comes from heaven and not from the riders' own will. The archive records the figure as seen and does not give it a verse it does not have.

The print reads easily because everything in it is in the chapter, and the archive gives the chapter beside the marks. What the archive adds, and marks as its own, is only the observation that Dürer changed the tempo. John sees four separate horsemen; a reader of this woodcut sees one event, and that is why it is the one everyone remembers. The riders were understood in 1498 as conquest, war, famine and death, and the plague years of the 1490s gave the picture an audience that did not need the labels.