A puffing head blows from a cloud in the corner.
Bible in art · Revelation
Revelation of St. John: Four Angels Holding up the Winds
Dürer · 1511
The Cleveland Museum of Art
In this sheet of the Apocalypse (cut c. 1496–98, printed 1511) Dürer shows the pause before the storm.
Four angels with swords hold back the winds, which blow from the corners as puffing heads. Above them another angel comes flying with a cross, and on the right an angel marks the foreheads of a crowd with a small cross.
From the text
- Four angels “holding back its four winds” (Revelation 7:1)
- Another angel ascending from the east “with the seal of the living God” (Revelation 7:2)
- “until we have sealed the foreheads of the servants of our God” (Revelation 7:3)
The artist’s own
- The winds as heads that puff out their cheeks, as on old maps
- The seal drawn as a cross marked on the forehead
- A fruit tree and a hill town in the middle
Details
A wind
The angel with the cross
An angel flies in, carrying a large cross.
Holding the winds
Angels with long swords stand guard, looking up.
The sealing
An angel touches a man’s forehead; others already bear a cross.
Albrecht Dürer, German, 1471–1528. The Cleveland Museum of Art (Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland, 1922.94.7) · Woodcut · Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access: Collection API record "share_license_status": "CC0" (Creative Commons Zero, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).