Is this the way the world ends?

Renaissance artists portrayed the apocalypse in gory, glorious detail, but their visions were not entirely pessimistic

The Apocalypse of St John
Dying days ... Albrecht Dürer's The Apocalypse of St John. Photograph: Corbis

Claims that the CERN laboratory's Large Hadron Collider is about to create a black hole that will swallow us all up are doubtless exaggerated. But suppose the world does end this week, what will it look like?

Artists have lavished their imaginations on the precise visual appearance of the End of Days. If you lived in Britain in the fourteenth century chances are you'd have seen the Day of Doom every Sunday painted on the wall of your local Church. There will be a great judging, with Christ in majesty, the blessed in Paradise, and the damned pulled down to Hell... but in medieval art the physics of this event are a lot vaguer than its theology. One of the triumphs of Renaissance art is to begin to give the apocalypse a physical reality. Perhaps the first artist to do that well is Albrecht Dürer in his late 15th-century woodcuts illustrating the Apocalypse of St John. In his boldly delineated vision there is a sense of what it might really be like when the events of history's end unfold: angels glide above vertiginous landscapes and crowds quail beneath a rain of fire. The earth is dwarfed by destructive forces that blaze in the heavens.

In Luca Signorelli's paintings of the Last Days in Orvieto Cathedral, done at the start of the sixteenth century, there is a compelling temporal development from the first appearance of bolts of thunder striking down mortals from the sky to the crowd of naked souls who stand beneath the revealed angelic sphere waiting to be judged. There's something quite eerie about Signorelli's lifelike vision of the termination of time. When I saw it terrible winds were shaking scaffolding on the outside of this cathedral on top of an exposed plateau in Umbria. It felt like a scene from the Omen. And yet, the artists who portrayed the end of the world in the Renaissance were not pessimists. They believed the destruction of life as we know it was the necessary prelude to the rise of the New Jerusalem - for the Book of the Apocalypse culminates in the revelation of a New Heaven and a New Earth.

So, if you're a Christian the art of the past offers reassurance. Suppose the universe implodes tomorrow, well, that might be a blessing - from a religious point of view.

On the other hand, I've just seen a bat-like black shadow coming out of a Francis Bacon painting like a messenger from Hell. And it's a windy day...

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