Botticelli signed only one painting, and he signed it with a warning. The Mystic Nativity of 1500 mixes a joyful Christmas scene with angels, embraces and fleeing devils, painted in a Florence that thought the world was ending.

Between 1803 and 1805 William Blake took a single passage from the Book of Revelation and turned it into a monster. The Great Red Dragon watercolours, four sheets made for the patron Thomas Butts, gave prophecy a body, a turned back, and a will, and they remain among the most frightening images the age of Romanticism produced.