The Apocalypse Tapestry: Biblical Visions Woven in Wool

Dec 07, 2023

James Romm

July 7, 2023 6:08 pm ET

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When Louis I, Duke of Anjou in late-14th-century France, commissioned a tapestry illustrating the Book of Revelation, the artist and weavers he hired must have quaked in their boots. That biblical text, a vision of the end of days recorded by a certain St. John, contains a welter of phantasmagorical images—not only the famous four horsemen but a beast with seven heads and 10 crowned horns, locusts with human faces and lions’ teeth, and allegories such as the “winepress of the wrath of God.”

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