See the Book

REVELATION (9:1-11)

Drawing. Pencil
46.7 X 28.5 cm.
First half of 19th century
Handmade paper
watermark (crescent with dentelate finial inside)

The drawing on a single sheet of handmade paper is in satisfactory condition with limited mechanical damage (tear in the upper right corner, creases, stains).

The drawing represents the ninth chapter of the Book of Revelation by John (Revelation 9:1-11), following the instructions in the ‘Painter’s Manual’ (Hermeneia) of Dionysios of Fourna, with minor deviations.¹ The trumpeting of the fifth angel signals the opening of the bottomless pit from which dense smoke issues in a mushroom-cloud that darkens the sun, and anthropomorphic locusts come forth with diadem, lions’ teeth and tails like scorpions, which attack human beings. Some men lie lifeless on the ground, while others hide and watch the scene in terror. Dominating the centre is the angel of the abyss, a daemonic figure with key on the leg.

Representations of the Apocalypse, which illustrate with a chain of eschatological symbolisms the coming of the Kingdom of God,² are rare in Orthodox Christendom before the seventeenth century.³ This fact most probably reflects the long-enduring reservation of the Eastern Church towards the canonical status of the book and the identity of its author.⁴ From the seventeenth century Revelation Cycles appear in wall-paintings on Mount Athos⁵ and more rarely in icons,⁶ in which influence from Western prints produced in the milieu of the Reformation (15th-16th century) is ascertained in the iconography of the subject. The earliest known anthivola of the Revelation date to the same period.⁷ The drawing in the Makris-Margaritis Collection reproduces with austerity and simplicity the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Athonite models, which copy Western prints of works by Cranach and Holbein. Chief characteristic of these is the mushroom-cloud of smoke, which in the environment of the Holy Mountain was later interpreted as a prefiguration of the atom bomb.⁸ The depiction of the devil Abbadon or Apollyon at the centre of the scene occurs with some differentiations in representations in the Athonite monasteries of Xcropotamos, Zographou and Iviron,⁹ and is encountered virtually identical in the Rila monastery in Bulgaria (19th century) ¹⁰ and in three more drawings of the same period in Bulgaria.¹¹ The present pencil drawing display obvious iconographic similarities and close stylistic affinity with these last representation of the subject in Bulgaria, which are linked with the workshops of Samokov and Bansko. In the light of the above, the drawing can be dated to the same period and its provenance attributed to the artistic milieu of the southern Balkans, possibly that of the local workshops of Bulgaria.

M. Nanou

1 Ερμηνεία 1909, 132-133.
2 Αγουρίδης‚ 1978, 24ff. Αγουρίδης 1994, 15ff. Βασιλειάδης 1988, 414 ff,
3 Cf. depictions of elements from the Apocalypse in Byzantine art (Thierry 1979, 319-330, figs 1-9), as well as representations of isolated subjects in miniatures and icons in the fifteenth-sixteenth century (Chatzidakis 1974, 197, pl. KZ’, Βοκοτόπουλος 1990, no. 9. Chatzidakis 1985, no. 63).
4 Renaud 1943, 7ff. Chatzidakis 1985, 110. Καραβιδόπουλος 1983, 35 1-353. Schiller 1990, 70ff. Huber 1995, 46-50. Ghioles 2002, 39.
5 Renaud 1943, 27ff. Schiller 1990, 388, fig. 1005. Huber 1995, 45ff.
6 Cf. four icons by Theodoros Poulakis, Ρηγόπουλος 1979, 57-66, 156-157, nos 20-22, pls 86, 87, 88, 94. Βοκοτόπουλος 1990, no. 89. Mystery Great and Wondrous 2002, no. 183 (I. Sissiou). Ρηγόπουλος 2003, 607-622.
7 Μπούρας 1987, nos 74a-f. Θησαυροί του Αγίου Όρους 1997, no. 3.3 (I. Tavlakis).
8 Huber 1995, 152-157. For the iconography of the scene, see also, Renaud 1943, 120-125. Schiller 1990, 388.
9 Τσιγάρας 2003, 231-232. Ταβλάκης 1995b, 21-23. Τσιμπούκης 2004, 21- 22, 51-52, figs 22-23. Cf. relative depiction of the daemon in the church of Saint Athanasios in Moschopolis (1745), Popa 1959, 35-36, fig. 8.
10 Enef 1992, 26, 88-91. The models of the cycle are identified in an illustrated Bible printed in the city of Chernigov, Ukraine, in 1717, which includes 21 prints by Nikodim Zubritzki and Makari Sinitzki. Lozanova 1998, 40-49.
11 Unpublished. We are grateful to Professor A. Dzurova and Dr R. Rousseva, Art Historian, for bringing the works to our attention.