This revised version of Natasha O'Hear's D.Phil. thesis is an ambitious interdisciplinary work that largely achieves its aim of raising consciousness of visual interpretations of the Book of Revelation within the wider text-dominated scholarship. Its strengths lie primarily in the disparate insights of the detailed discussions of specific pieces, but the work never really delivers in its desire to build on the works of Berdini and O'Kane in developing a broader hermeneutic of visual exegesis.
The bulk of the book comprises seven primary case studies, split over five chapters: the Lambeth Apocalypse (c.1260); the Angers Apocalypse Tapestry (c.1373–80); Hubert Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece (c.1432) and Hans Memling's St John Altarpiece (c.1474–9); Alessandro Botticelli's Mystic Nativity (c.1500); and the Apocalypse Series of Albrecht Dürer (1498) and Lucas Cranach (1522). However, O'Hear's concern for situating images and interpretations within a context introduces a number of other extended treatments by way of contrast, including the broad impact of the Berengaudus commentary on Anglo-Norman Apocalypse iconography, the relationship of Botticelli's Mystic Nativity to his wider work, and the significance of the late fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century woodcut tradition for Dürer and Cranach.
At points, historians, theologians, art-historians and exegetes will no doubt each have issues with the engagement with their respective fields, which is necessarily brief and often treats contested or complex situations slightly superficially; whether those are the thorny issues of defining allegory, the politics of Louis I and the Court of Anjou, fifteenth-century eucharistic theology or the complexities of Savonarola and the piagnoni in 1490s Florence. Nonetheless, in each case a valiant effort is made to situate the respective artworks, not only within particular iconographic traditions but also within the politics and worldview of their commissioning, manufacture and display. While minor errors may frustrate, the scope does allow for some important correctives to existing scholarly literature, such as how the Angers Apocalypse Tapestry goes beyond the traditional Anglo-Norman Apocalypse iconography (chapter 2), or the recognition that Dürer's Apocalypse Series is actually somewhat less overtly political and ‘reformed’ in its mindset than his Koberger Bible exemplars (chapter 5).
Chapter 6, ‘Hermeneutical Reflections and Visual Exegesis’, attempts to weave the threads of the disparate case studies into some overarching design but feels the least successful part of the work. By emphasising the relative ‘success’ of the later images over the earlier Anglo-Norman manuscript illustrations, O'Hear stresses visual exegesis as Sachexegese, arguing that such images can never truly offer detailed dissection of a biblical text but rather must ‘evoke via visual means what they or their patrons believed the essence or Sache selbst of the Book of Revelation to be’ (p. 200). Interesting points are raised here, such as the particular status of John as visionary, but not really developed to the extent one might hope.
A final word must go to the illustrations, so vital to a work of detailed visual commentary such as this. Some forty-three (mostly half- or quarter-page) colour plates are reproduced in a central section, enough to satisfy broad illustrative purposes but insufficient either to gauge the scope of the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse illustrations or to parse the detail of John's vision in the St John Altarpiece (where the single plate opts for showing the broad context of the altarpiece over the detailed corner of the right-hand panel, which is the focus of much of chapter 3). Some of the images are readily available on the internet and, where possible, links have been provided; but in the case of the Lambeth Apocalypse or Koberger Bible, detailed engagement with O'Hear's argument still necessitates readers having to hand the more extensive monographs on particular works.
