The Apocalypse of John: the architectural symbolism of visual exegesis

Abstract

A hermeneutic literary criticism of the last text of the New Testament canon can be complemented by an architectural criticism of metaphorical and rhetorical structures and plots, presented as an ultimate resolution to fundamental problems, posed both by the kerigma and by the Hellinised religious experience of the Old Testament (apocalyptic and epistolary genres). The text of the Revelation has staging structures that imply its performative reading, and suggested radical eschatological ways of resolving conflicts allow for equally radical exegetic methods, with a feminist orientation, for example. Analytical metaphors that we have employed, taken from the arsenal of art history, such as ‘polyptich’ or ‘non-figurative painting’, prompt us to use an experimental paradigm of diagrammatics: a visualization of compositional schemata as the equivalents of a cognitive apparatus. The hearer/reader has the opportunity to set off on an eschatological journey with the author of the Revelation but also to have an epistemological walk with its exegetes and commentators.