Albrecht Dürer

'and I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the Earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with beasts of the Earth' (Revelation 6.8).
This excerpt from the Book of Revelation describing the arrival of the Four Horsemen to Earth is arguably the passage most identifiable with and symbolic of the Apocalypse. Death, famine, war and pestilence have been given visible and terrifying forms and no one is to be spared; women, men, children, clerics, nobles and peasants will all fall.

In this woodcut, the most famous and dramatic of his Apocalypse series, Dürer injected a feeling of speed and danger into the scene not achieved before in a print. In earlier representations the four riders were often depicted separately, here however they jostle for space, competing with each other to ride out and bring destruction to earth. It is a snapshot, a moment frozen in time: the horse at far right is disappearing out of the image whilst the last horse is yet to fully enter it. Dürer has masterfully captured the sense of an unstoppable wave of destruction, with Death, grinning triumphantly, presiding over it.