# The Apocalypse Pictures

Western sex culture as the eastern pretext for 1492, written down as Revelation

![Viktor Vasnetsov, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1887](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/apocalypse/apocalypse_vasnetsov.jpg)

> **TL;DR:** The nine files are real artworks. They belong together because of New Chronology. The Vesuvian sex pieces are the western public cult later labeled ancient Rome. Disease following that cult gave the east a pretext to invade. Anatoly Fomenko’s reconstruction treats the 1492 cavalry campaign as the event the Book of Revelation recorded as the Apocalypse. The horsemen canvases picture that ride. The plague folio and the comet plates keep the same grammar: arrows from heaven, omen of fire.

A mix of doom paintings and sex statues invites the same first question: are these real sculptures, or art pieces at all?

They are real. They are mixed media. They sit in one stack because the sex pictures and the horsemen are the same story. Western bacchanals and the venereal plague that followed them gave the Ottoman / Ataman east its reason to ride west in 1492. The Book of Revelation is the written form of that ride. Two marble groups from the buried Vesuvian cities are sculptures. One baked-clay plaque is a small household relief. Two files are oil paintings of the Four Horsemen. One file is a handwritten Italian chronicle page with demons shooting arrows into a heap of bodies. One file is a pair of engraved book pages tracking a comet night by night in 1665. Two files are Roman wall paintings of sex, one of them a collage assembled from several frescoes.

Museum labels still date the Vesuvian objects to the year 79 and the oil paintings to 1796 and 1887. Those captions are the schoolbook timeline. New Chronology puts the sex art in the same centuries as the crusade. The objects were excavated, cataloged, and hung. The fight is over which century they belong to.

## Western sex, eastern pretext, Revelation as the ride

Anatoly Fomenko’s [New Chronology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_\(Fomenko\)) compresses “ancient Rome” into the medieval Rus-Horde empire. The first Horde wave, in the 13th and 14th centuries, is the period Fomenko calls antique classicism: open public sex, garden Priapus, tavern frescoes, Pan carved in a rich villa. Schoolbooks file that material as pagan Pompeii, frozen in 79 AD by a volcano. Fomenko dates the same Pompeii sex frescoes to the 15th and 16th centuries, the window of the crusade that targeted them. The [Earth history timeline](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/page.md) hangs those pictures in the 14th-century block for that reason. They are the western cult, still visible.

That cult gave the east a pretext. Fomenko identifies a [bacchanalian form of western Christianity](https://chronologia.org/en/how_it_was/05_08.html#the9) as the dominant public religion in the west across the 13th through 15th centuries. Ceremonial prostitution sat inside liturgy. Brothels operated in the open. Disease, syphilis chief among the names later given to it, traveled back east along Horde trade routes. The second Ottoman / Ataman wave was austere. It blamed the west’s liberal classicism for mass infection, including venereal infection. The Khans treated the sick quarters as a state problem to be burned.

> The Khans of the Empire found themselves confronting a serious state problem… the khans made the only, as they thought, correct decision — to wipe out the diseased population using military force. To burn down the houses of the sick.

That is Fomenko and Gleb Nosovskiy in [*How It Was in Reality*, chapter 5 §38](https://chronologia.org/en/how_it_was/05_38.html). The [1492 Apocalypse Crusade](https://paradigmthreat.net/timeline/evt-the-apocalypse-crusade-reverse-exodus) is that decision on the ground: convert or kill, cavalry to the four directions, the eclectic empire turned into a slave empire.

The Book of Revelation is how the plan was written down. Fomenko places the Revelation text in **1486**, six years before the ride. The [letters to the seven churches](https://paradigmthreat.net/timeline/evt-revelation-coming-apocalypse) announce an armed-cavalry purge of the marked and the diseased. Priests sold the slaughter as God’s wrath on sinners. People who could flee took ship. Later centuries canonized those letters as a vision of a future end and mixed them with an older Golden Age catastrophe. Scaligerian schoolbooks then split the same campaign into “Ottoman expansion” and “Columbus.” The pictures below are the visual stack of that one event: the cult, the plague-as-arrows, the horsemen, the omen.

## Two canvases of the same charge

Viktor Vasnetsov’s *Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse* (1887), the picture at the top of this page, is oil on canvas, about 28 by 54 inches, now in Moscow’s Glinka museum of musical culture. From the viewer’s right: Conquest on the white horse with a bow; War on the red horse with a sword; Famine on the black horse with scales; Death on the pale horse with a scythe. Above them sits the Lamb on the book of seals. Below them, people and broken columns.

Vasnetsov was a Russian history painter. He put the horsemen in a landscape that still reads as an army. The [Earth history timeline](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/page.md) already hangs this canvas that way: the four riders as the empire expanding to the four directions, and the Christian cross laid over that ride. Revelation 6 is the caption the churches printed. The picture is cavalry.

Benjamin West painted the same subject three times. A large drawing went to London’s Royal Academy in the 1780s. An oil of 1796 is in the Detroit Institute of Arts. A much larger oil of 1817, more than twenty feet across, is at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The pale-horse picture used for 1492 is West’s *Death on the Pale Horse*. Detroit’s 1796 picture was shown in London as *The opening of the four seals* and, in 1802, at the Paris Salon. West took the title from Revelation 6:8: a pale horse, Death as the rider, power to kill with sword, hunger, death, and beasts.

![Benjamin West, Death on the Pale Horse, 1796](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/apocalypse/apocalypse_b_west.jpg)

West’s foreground is a woman and children down, a starved body, a lion on a man, a dead dove next to a snake. The sky is storm. The 1796 canvas was painted while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, so museum wall text often treats it as a comment on that war. The timeline treats it as a picture of the 1492 Apocalypse: armed horsemen as the public face of a planned reset, letters to seven churches first, then the ride. West is late. He is painting a memory that print had already turned into a future prophecy.

Both canvases are art pieces. Both are two-dimensional paint. Neither is a sculpture. Both are how a later public was taught to *see* Revelation: horses, weapons, bodies, sky-fire. The 1492 campaign used that grammar while the killing was still a military plan.

## Arrows from heaven

The file labeled as the Black Death is a photograph of a parchment page. The red heading reads *Come fu moria grande*: “how there was a great dying.” Winged figures in the upper half draw bows. Bodies in colored tunics fill the lower half, arrows in them. The script around the picture is late medieval Italian.

![Giovanni Sercambi, Come fu moria grande, Lucca chronicle, folio 49v](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/apocalypse/black_death.jpg)

The page is from Giovanni Sercambi’s illustrated chronicle of Lucca. Sercambi was an apothecary who lived from 1348 to 1424. The fair copy of the chronicle is Archivio di Stato di Lucca, manuscript 107, finished around 1400. Folio 49v is the first of several plague pictures in that book. Louise Marshall’s study of the cycle treats the shooters as God’s executioners: angels or demons allowed to work because the text blames the dying on sin. The same manuscript illustrates later outbreaks the same way. The picture is a repeating type in that book.

Medieval Europe already used arrows as a picture of plague. Some people are hit and some are missed, the way a bowstring seems to choose. The timeline places this folio next to the 14th-century religious split, flagellant processions, and the claim that disease in the west became the pretext for a later crusade. The object is manuscript illumination. The claim it carries is older than germ theory: death arrives from above, on purpose.

## The comet that announced 1666

The two-page spread of comet heads and tails is copperplate engraving from a printed book. Latin titles name Johannes Hevelius and the year 1665 at Gdańsk (*Gedanum*). Dates run in columns: 6 January, 7 January, then April. Engravers signed the plates *sculpt.* In a print shop that word names the person who cut the copper plate.

![Hevelius comet observations for 1665, plates in Lubieniecki, Theatrum cometicum](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/apocalypse/great_comet_of_1665.jpg)

Stanisław Lubieniecki (1623–1675) published *Theatrum cometicum* in Amsterdam in 1666–1668. Volume one is a correspondence anthology on the comets of 1664 and 1665. Hevelius is one of the observers Lubieniecki printed. Hevelius had already issued his own *Prodromus cometicus* (1665). The plates in this file are Hevelius’s night-by-night shapes, collected into Lubieniecki’s theater of comets. Lubieniecki’s third part includes the reading that the 1664 comet announced the Great Fire of London as punishment.

1666 had already been marked as an apocalyptic year because of the number of the Beast. The Great Plague of London and the Fire followed the comet window. The timeline treats that sequence as another planned scare after 1492: comet, plague, fire, then the conversion of “apocalypse” from a lived reset into a prophecy of a future end. The pictures themselves are scientific art. They document a real comet. The politics sat in the commentary wrapped around the plates.

## The sex the later empire locked in a cabinet

Four of the files are erotic. They are explicit. They are also the part of the stack that answers the sculpture question most directly.

The collage titled “Brothels of Pompeii” is a modern assembly of several older wall paintings. One panel is a framed fresco stamped **27690** at the top of the frame. That number is a Naples museum inventory. The painting is a man and woman on all fours, with the Latin caption *Lente impelle* (“push slowly”). It was cut from Pompeii VII.9.33, a tavern excavated in 1822, and is now in the Gabinetto Segreto (Secret Cabinet) of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. John R. Clarke published a photograph of the same inventory number in *Looking at Lovemaking*. Scholars map the building as a *caupona*, an inn-tavern. The painting still hung where customers could see it.

![MANN inv. 27690, Lente impelle fresco from Pompeii VII.9.33](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/apocalypse/pompeii_painting2.jpg)

The second Pompeii file is a close crop of that same 27690 fresco: wooden frame, gold inner edge, cracked plaster, the inventory stamp. It is the same object as the upper-right panel of the collage. The collage also includes a damaged bed scene on ochre plaster, a small grainy pair of figures, and a standing bearded male with an oversized erection and a caduceus (Mercury’s snake-staff). That last type is the priapic Mercury / Hermes the Secret Cabinet keeps with the other fertility pictures: a luck charm and a wealth charm for the house.

![Collage of Pompeian erotic frescoes, including MANN 27690](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/apocalypse/pompeii_painting.jpg)

Bourbon excavators pulled many of these panels off the walls and framed them like easel paintings. In the 19th century the museum locked the whole class of objects in a separate room. Access was for “mature” men. The cabinet was closed and reopened more than once. It has been on a public circuit again since 2000. That lock is the later moral system sitting on top of the older one.

Fomenko’s dating makes the lock a sequel. If the frescoes belong to the 15th and 16th centuries, they are evidence of the bacchanalian west the [second Ottoman wave](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/page.md) said it had to destroy. The timeline’s 15th-century block is blunt: antique classicism produced the orgies and the venereal plagues; the Ataman / Cossack spirit that came out of Russia-Horde the second time was severe and chaste; modern Islam grew from that austerity. The Secret Cabinet is what you do with the proof after the crusade wins. You keep the marble. You change the century. You call it pagan Rome so the 1492 pretext disappears.

## Two marbles and a clay plaque

*Pan and the Goat* is a real marble sculpture. It was found in 1752 in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Stefano De Caro’s 2000 Secret Cabinet catalog is the published source for this photograph. The group shows the goat-god Pan copulating with a goat on a rocky base. It is Hellenistic in type, Roman in find-spot, and still in Naples. For two and a half centuries it has been the exhibit that proves the cabinet’s point: this culture carved in the open what later Europe would only allow behind a door.

![Marble group of Pan and a goat, Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/apocalypse/pan-and-the-goat-marble-statue-de-caro-2000-25.jpg)

The file named as a Priapus marble fountain, about 67 AD, from Michael Grant’s 1997 *Eros in Pompeii* (page 51), is also a real marble sculpture photographed against Pompeian wall painting. Grant’s book is the 1997 reprint of his 1975 catalog of the Naples erotic collection, with photographs by Antonia Mulas. The House of the Vettii in Pompeii had a marble Priapus used as a garden fountain: a channel through the phallus so water would jet. That house also had satyr fountain statues in the peristyle. The figure in this photograph has cloven hooves and a raised (damaged) arm, which is satyr / Pan anatomy more than the usual human-bodied Priapus. Either Grant’s page labeled a priapic satyr as Priapus, or the photograph’s title borrowed that catalog’s god-name for a neighbor in the same house. The object is excavated marble with a repair across the lower leg. It is a sculpture.

![Marble priapic satyr or Priapus fountain, Vesuvian, Grant 1997 catalog](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/apocalypse/priapus-marble-fountain-c-67-ad-grant-1997-51.jpg)

The last file is the smallest and the oldest in the schoolbook dating. It is a square terracotta plaque in reddish clay, a couple in relief, mounted on a dark ground with a museum string. It matches the mass-produced erotic plaques of southern Mesopotamia in the Old Babylonian / Isin-Larsa period, conventionally about 2000–1700 BC. Museums from the Louvre to the Met hold the type. They were household or votive objects, small enough to hold in one hand. The exact inventory of this photograph is not stamped on the object the way 27690 is stamped on the Pompeii frame. The class is real archaeology. It extends the same sexual public art backward, on the conventional timeline, into Mesopotamia. On a compressed chronology, “Babylonian” and “Pompeian” are neighboring copies of one imperial culture. Victorian shame is the later overlay.

![Old Babylonian type terracotta erotic plaque](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/apocalypse/sex-sculpture.jpg)

## What the nine files are doing together

Take them in the order New Chronology already hangs them.

The Pompeii and Herculaneum sex art is the western cult: brothels, garden fountains, Pan, Priapus, Mercury’s staff, luck in the phallus. That is the pretext. Sercambi’s arrows are the plague grammar that made the pretext preachable: death from heaven, sinners marked, processions. Vasnetsov and West are the ride itself, Revelation 6 as cavalry, the 1486 letters become 1492 on the ground, then the flight schoolbooks still call Columbus. Lubieniecki’s comet plates sit on 1664–1666: another omen year, plague, fire, then the conversion of apocalypse from a dated campaign into a forever-future.

The sculptures are real. The paintings are real. The plates are real. The lock on the Naples cabinet is real. Fomenko’s reconstruction is the caption that makes the stack one event. A culture that put Pan in a rich villa and Priapus on a fountain was rewritten as a dead pagan prelude. A cavalry invasion that used western sex and western plague as its warrant was rewritten as a vision of the end of the world. A comet that everyone could see was rewritten as God’s press release. The pictures survived because marble, plaster, oil, and copper are harder to delete than a parish memory.

## Where next

- [Earth history timeline](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/page.md) — 14th-century Pompeii and plague plates; 1486 Revelation / 1492 Apocalypse; 1664–1666 comet, plague, and fire
- [1492 Apocalypse Crusade](https://paradigmthreat.net/timeline/evt-the-apocalypse-crusade-reverse-exodus) — bacchanalian pretext, Khan quote, cavalry campaign
- [Revelation of the coming Apocalypse](https://paradigmthreat.net/timeline/evt-revelation-coming-apocalypse) — 1486 letters as the six-year briefing
- Fomenko and Nosovskiy, [*How It Was in Reality*](https://chronologia.org/en/how_it_was/05_08.html#the9) — western bacchanals; [ch. 5 §38](https://chronologia.org/en/how_it_was/05_38.html) — burn the houses of the sick
- [Nightmare / night mare](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/investigations/nightmare-night-mare-1492-apocalypse-crusade-investigation.md) — horsemen as lived night cavalry
- [The Hidden History of Words](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/the-hidden-history-of-words.md) — canon, cannon, trump, trumpet in the same 1492 window
- [Lost Tribe of Benjamin](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/lost-tribe-of-benjamin-apotheosis-and-monotheisms-war.md) — monotheism’s war on the older public cults

## Framing and limits

**Prisca sapientia:** [ancient wisdom](https://paradigmthreat.net/docs/PRISCA_SAPIENTIA.md) is the default here. People who carved Pan, painted sex on a tavern wall, and treated a comet as a dated message already knew their own houses.

This page identifies the nine files as artworks and names the museums, books, and inventory numbers that hold them. Conventional dates (first-century Pompeii, 1400 Lucca, 1668 Amsterdam, 1796 Detroit, 1887 Moscow) are the labels those institutions print. Fomenko’s dates for the Vesuvian sex art (15th–16th century) and for Revelation (1486, as a military text before 1492) are the New Chronology layer that makes the stack one campaign. The [Earth history timeline](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/page.md) and the [1492 crusade](https://paradigmthreat.net/timeline/evt-the-apocalypse-crusade-reverse-exodus) event carry the Deep State / reverse-exodus overlay around that Fomenko core. West and Vasnetsov are late painters of the ride. Grant 1997 page 51 is the cited source for the fountain statue; the goat legs in the photograph may mean that page’s “Priapus” is a priapic satyr in the same Vesuvian group. The terracotta plaque is identified by type, not by a stamped inventory on the clay.

Keywords: #Apocalypse #FourHorsemen #BenjaminWest #ViktorVasnetsov #BlackDeath #GiovanniSercambi #GreatComet1665 #Hevelius #Lubieniecki #Pompeii #Herculaneum #GabinettoSegreto #PanAndTheGoat #Priapus #1492 #Revelation #Fomenko #NewChronology #Ottoman #Bacchanal #ParadigmThreatFiles

**Last updated:** 2026-08-16T11:23:45-04:00

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*Written and narrated by Ari Asulin, with drafting and research support from LLM agents.*