Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
The book, and what is inside it
John the Evangelist is given an eagle, a book, and sometimes a chalice with a serpent. The title recorded here calls him the Divine, which is the epithet that attaches to him as the author of the Book of Revelation, and it names an episode from that book: the opening of the fifth seal. This is the rarest arrangement in the whole attribute system. The saint's sign is a text; the subject is the contents of the text; and the picture therefore has to depict not the man's identity but his reading.
What the record holds
The catalogue dates the work to 1610 and gives the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), New York City, NY, US as its location. The dimensions are 224 x 194 cm, a tall upright. The style is given as Mannerism Late Renaissance and the nationality as Spanish; the measured colour family is ochre.
Categories from three centuries later
The subject categories on this entry are worth reading plainly: alongside Religion and mythological cultural heritage, the index files the work under Abstract Art and under Surrealism. Both terms postdate the picture by roughly three hundred years. They are not a claim about the painter; they are the index describing what it finds — a composition it cannot file as a scene of the observable world. A subject drawn from an apocalypse gives an index that problem honestly.
Sources
6 references- Greco, Nicolás — Getty ULAN
Spanish artist, active late 16th - early 17th century
- El Greco — Wikipedia
Doménikos Theotokópoulos (Greek: Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος, pronounced [ðoˈminikos θeotoˈkopulos]; 1 October 1541 – 7 April 1614), most widely known as El Greco (Spanish pronunciation: [el ˈɣɾeko]; "The Greek"), was a Greek painter, sculptor
- Greco, El — Getty ULAN
Greek painter, 1541-1614, active in Spain
- Opening of the Fifth Seal — Wikidata
description: painting by El Greco (cut down, top part missing); inception: 1610; dimensions: 222.3 × 193 cm; collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Opening of the Fifth Seal — Wikipedia
The Opening of the Fifth Seal (or The Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse or The Vision of Saint John) was painted in the last years of El Greco's life for a side-altar of the church of Saint John the Baptist outside the walls of Toledo. Before 19
- metmuseum.org — reference for "Opening of the Fifth Seal"
Authoritative source for this work (metmuseum.org).
