Dürer's Apocalypse Series was primarily an aesthetic enterprise yet simultaneously represents a theologically sensitive presentation of text and images of the Book of Revelation. The koberger illustrations offer a literal yet fairly compressed interpretation of the source‐text.
The close relationship between the three works, as well as with their Anglo‐Norman predecessors, is also explored throughout, although they all have distinctive hermeneutical emphases. All three woodcut series appear within examples of the new print media and thus full attention is given in each case to their more public context. This chapter concentrates on visual interpretations of the Book of Revelation from the late fifteenth century to the early sixteenth century, with particular reference to the Koberger Bible of 1483, Dürer's Apocalypse Series of 1498/1511 and Cranach's illustrations for Luther's New Testament of 1522.
