JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This vision of The Apocalypse doesn’t look overwhelmingly apocalpse-y, to me, but the message was put across to the viewer that something bad was happening, what with the hail and brimstone and lightning and fire being visited upon the dissolving church in the background and the murdered clergy in the foreground. The woodcut appeared in Joseph Gruenbeck’s Speculum naturalis coelestis & propheticae visionis, printed in Nuremberg in October 1508, being a short (18 leaves) prognostication on the fate of humankind and its wicked ways. It is a very orderly fall from grace, but a fall nevertheless, and the reader no doubt was reminded of the waiting ring of fire.
