Albrecht Dürer: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Abstract

This year is the 550th anniversary of the birth of the famous artist Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, Germany. “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” is one of his most famous works. It is a woodcut in which Dürer depicts the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse of St. John. The four horsemen represent conquest, war, famine and death, the four great threats for all mortals. But, beyond this standard interpretation, another possibility for understanding the artist’s intention emerges by taking into account Dürer’s contemporary context at the time he created this work. He experienced the beginnings of early capitalism with its principles of competition, increasing prices and the formation of monopolies and business companies. This experience is characterized in the third horseman, the one who holds an unbalanced scale, like that which produces social injustice. The consequence is demonstrated in the fourth horseman, the death that devours all of society. With this, Dürer presents an interpretation of his era that has not lost its relevance, once again, in times of death, whether by climate change, migration or the pandemics.