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.