Artists

Albrecht Dürer, Odilon Redon, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Jean Duvet, Béla Kondor

Press release

//The exhibition can only be visited between Thursday and Sunday, with a same-day admission ticket valid for any of the museum’s exhibitions.// Apokálypsis is the Greek title of the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, meaning ‘revelation’. The writing, attributed to Saint John the Evangelist, records the prophecy he received as a heavenly message on the island of Patmos, foretelling the end of the world. The exhibition focuses on Apocalypse cycles based on of the Book of Revelation. The text of John’s visions has inspired many artists since the Middle Ages. Scenes from the Apocalypse have been brought to life on the pages of illuminated manuscripts, and a multitude of frescos, tapestry cycles and stained-glass windows in churches attest to the important role these visions have played in Christian iconography. The invention of printmaking and the rise of book printing in the fifteenth century opened up new opportunities: prints became widely distributed and had a powerful impact on the public. Expectations of the end of the world gripped people as strongly at the close of the first millennium and around the year 1500 as they did at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, since approaching the end of an era tends to heighten fears of ultimate destruction. The threatening challenges of our own time – wars, epidemics, the climate crisis and social tensions – have made the theme of the Apocalypse acutely relevant once more. The core of the exhibition comprises Apocalypse cycles depicting visions from the Book of Revelation: compositions by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Jean Duvet and Odilon Redon. These graphic series demonstrate how Dürer’s prints influenced depictions of the Apocalypse throughout Europe in subsequent centuries, while also highlighting clear differences, which resulted from religious disputes, conflicting interpretations of the Bible and opposing political viewpoints. The exhibition concludes with visions by twentieth-century Hungarian artists, including Béla Kondor. These visions of the Apocalypse, spanning over half a millennium, were selected from the holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts (Collection of Prints and Drawings, Old Masters’ Gallery, Old Hungarian Collection) and the Hungarian National Gallery (Collection of Prints and Drawings, Collection of Contemporary Art). The curator of the exhibition is Szilvia Bodnár, an art historian of the Museum of Fine Arts’ Department of Prints and Drawings.