Focus on this artwork and explain the Description.
According to Frances Carey, Deputy Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, the painting shows the destruction of Babylon and the material world by natural cataclysm. William Feaver, art critic of The Observer, believes that this painting pictures the collapse of Edinburgh in Scotland. Calton Hill, Arthur's Seat, and the Castle Rock, Feaver says, are falling together into the valley between them.  However, Charles F. Stuckey, professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is skeptical about such connections, arguing that it has not been conclusively proved. Michael Freeman, Supernumerary Fellow and Lecturer in Human Geography at Mansfield College, describes the painting as follows:
 Storms and volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and other natural disasters 'swept like tidal waves through early nineteenth-century periodicals, broadsheets and panoramas'. Catastrophic and apocalyptic visions acquired a remarkable common currency, the Malthusian spectre a constant reminder of the need for atonement. For some onlookers, Martin's most famous canvases of divine revelation seemed simultaneously to encode new geological and astronomical truths. This was ... powerfully demonstrated in The Great Day of his Wrath (1852), in which the Edinburgh of James Hutton, with its grand citadel, hilltop terraces and spectacular volcanic landscape, explodes outwards and appears suspended upside-down, flags still flying from its buildings and before crashing head-on into the valley below.
According to the Tate Gallery, the United Kingdom's national museum of British and Modern Art, the painting closely follows a portion of Revelation 6, a chapter from the New Testament of the Bible:
James Hutton canvas Castle Rock Calton Hill Tate Revelation 6 Arthur's Seat Tate Gallery New Testament Edinburgh volcanic eruptions The Observer School of the Art Institute of Chicago