The bible and its theology lie at the heart of the Western artistic tradition. Of all its books Revelation in particular lends itself to visualization. The highly visual character of the text is the result of its self-description as based on the visionary experience of its author, John of Patmos. It uses a great variety of symbols, animate and inanimate: human, animal, demonic and numerical, many of them horrifying, and which are so clearly depicted that they can easily be transferred from the literary to the graphic mode of presentation. As the authors of this book clearly show it has proved to be a fertile source of imaginative stimulus for artists working across a range of media, including music, for the last two thousand years up to and including the present day. They are particularly concerned to emphasise how the book of Revelation and its concept of interpretative unveiling have resonated in visual art, especially in its expression within the popular imagination. Hence they choose the broader word, apocalypse, rather than the narrower name for their title.
By means of a set of examples carefully and skillfully chosen from the immense number available, for their lasting significance and innovatory nature, the authors construct a theological and visual history of the text. Since the logic of Revelation is not that of history as linear, but of history as episodic narrative, the authors’ construction of their own text follows a similar pattern.
After an introduction which provides a good summary of the book and its interpretations, they move into a series of ten concise and thematic chapters, each commenting on one of the great and most famous images from Revelation, and offering a survey of the different approaches to the given image in the arts and popular culture. These approaches in turn explain the artistic reception of the text of Revelation and its theological and historical relevance in particular periods. The history of the theology runs in parallel with the art-historical discussion. A concluding chapter draws their findings together, and discusses the nature of visual exegesis and its contemporary relevance. Inevitably this structure means that the book has to suffer some degree of repetition, not only because in the biblical text the images are interlinked, but also because the initial choice of illustrative representations, particularly those of the manuscripts, tend to recur in each case. However this repetition is a small price to pay for its great readability and its remarkably accessible style, which sometimes verges on the didactic, given that the research and scholarship on display are immense. The text is accompanied by a wealth of illustrations with a generous number of beautiful coloured plates. It culminates in what is perhaps its most interesting and important contribution: the way the imagery functions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in a culture which is almost entirely secular and divorced from any notion of the dominion and action of God in history, the main force after all of what is the last book of the bible.
Revelation is a book about God and Christ not symbols. Yet it is the symbolism, not the text and its theology, which endures. This is a most interesting example of the secularization of scripture: the idea that it is possible in modern thinking to divorce the theological elements from the sacred texts while retaining an interpretation of history or ethics afforded by them. The theology of Revelation has of course become the subject of an immense bibliography in modern biblical studies, but though not antithetical to ‘academic analysis’ the authors are anxious to distance themselves from it, in that their desire is to show that the reception of the imagery is itself a theological enterprise. Besides being what must be almost the final word on the art history of the book of Revelation, this book is also a contribution to the newly fashionable area of biblical studies called reception history; and the authors further succeed in their stated aim of showing the continuing importance of the images of Revelation as symbolizing fundamental aspects of human existence and experience. While it is true that due to their immediacy images have the power to provide a more accessible and arresting way of making theological and ethical nuances, and the book shows well how they can serve as an interpretative and exegetical tool, nevertheless Revelation is a special case. It is the only visionary text in the New Testament and as such obviously lends itself to this kind of treatment. A new stage in the discussion of the problem of theology and imagery would be to consider theologically what is the theological relationship between word and image, particularly with regard to the normative status of the Word of God, and in view of the fact that the Oxford lexicographers have recently declared that the emoji, an image, is actually a word.
