ABSTRACT
In the fifth chapter of the last book of the Bible, the enigmatic Revelation of John of Patmos, there is a reference to a scroll ‘written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals’. The scroll is held in the right hand of God who is sitting on his throne in heaven. It announces the seven disasters that the Lord has in store for mankind at the end of the world. An angel speaks with a great voice saying, ‘Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?’ Only one creature felt the call to do this, a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes – a mystical symbol for Christ himself, who had been crucified (slaughtered like a lamb) and risen from the dead. The lamb broke open the first four seals and each time a horse and rider appeared. When the fourth seal was opened the horse was a ‘pale horse’ and the name of its rider was Death, and a crowd of dead people from the abode of the dead followed him. And they ‘were given authority over the fourth part of the
earth, to kill with sword, and with famine, and with death, and by the wild beasts of the earth’. This image of apocalyptic terror, of an army of skeletons sowing death and destruction through war, famine and pestilence (bellum, fames et pestis), was often found in the literature and visual arts of the late Middle Ages. It is not difficult to understand the reason for this: between the beginning of the fourteenth and the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, with terrifying frequency, was struck by the disasters foretold in the fourth seal (only the wild beasts were lacking).
