Tag: eschatology

  • Durer’s ‘A heavenly body’: painting apocalypse

    Durer’s ‘A heavenly body’: painting apocalypse

    Albrecht Durer surely had the sharpest eye of any painter.  Think of his watercolour A big piece of turf, made in 1503, half a millennium before the hyperrealist painters of our own time.  Or the astonishing sketch of his own head and hand on the reverse of the painting in Paris known as Portrait of…

  • The new eschatology

    The new eschatology

    As 2016 comes to an end the heavens are full of what Flann O’Brien’s great scientist De Selby called ‘black air’.  A long night, it appears, is about to fall on two continents.  In the United States a plutocratic bully and egomaniac with the crudest social and political attitudes is about to take power, unrestrained…