Las Huelgas Apocalypse, attributed to the monk Beatus of Liebana, completed in the year 1220 A.D. Forty-nine images of a tricyclic narrative survive. Here we have a standard, dare I say, "civilian" end-times image: Four Horsemen, four Evangelists, glorious Agnus Dei, and the ubiquitous beast crouching daintily behind our boy Saint John. But the colors, the treatment of space—these are anything but standard. Oh, of course someone has always thought to take the usually quasi-obsessive focus on backgrounds and middlegrounds away from the apocalyptic image. But something always remains. Something to remind us of the physical.
But here we see nothing. Nothing but color, reflection, smudge, fire, moon, eternal damnation, eternal salvation, interplanetary tension . . . We feel through color and treatment of space a level of tension that has only before been achieved through use of the figure. Take all figurative elements out of this image and does it become something else? Does the feeling change? Does it lose any of its intensity or bravado? No. So what do we have? A giant leap towards abstraction, even a kind of abstract expressionism, in what some view as the most dead and uninspired chunk of history? A hidden genius? A guy who never got the hang of nature drawing? Who knows. Gotta love Spain!
