10/5/2023 0 Comments Natural life tapestriesthose which have not the seal of God in their foreheads should be tormented five months and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man. and there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth. Now, in seeking to relate it to our present predicament, I spent a day of isolation reading Revelation.Īnd he opened the bottomless pit and there arose a smoke. I was awed by the beauty and horror of the work. When I visited the tapestry in February, none of this was on my mind, even as coronavirus was spreading across China and into South Korea. To put it another way: is this pandemic a dress rehearsal for trials to come, a final warning perhaps? Over the past few weeks, as people have had more time to reflect, discussions about human behaviour and causality have adopted a more urgent tone. ![]() “We should think of the current outbreak as a preview of things to come, the slightest taste of what life will be like during the great tribulation.” So what does Revelation – and what might the tapestry – tell us about our responses to Covid-19? Where better to turn than Fox News? On 18 March, as the pandemic was beginning to affect the United States, the TV station asked viewers: “Are we witnessing the end of the world?” It turned to a man called Tom Meyer, whom it described as “a Bible professor who has the Book of Revelation memorised”. “People turned to Revelation in difficult times, as they are attracted by its deterministic world view and its black-and-white certainty,” adds O’Hear. For Louis, the tapestry was “primarily a status symbol, a sign of wealth and power” says Dr Natasha O’Hear, whose book, Picturing the Apocalypse, is a study of two millennia of art inspired by the Book of Revelation. Europe had lost tens of millions in the plague. The house of Anjou is promoted through its heraldry the fleur-de-lys symbolises a resurgent France in its battles with the English. The present day was also woven into the tapestry. Photograph: Jaubert French Collection/Alamy Stock Photo One of the most beautiful images, after all the blood and fury, is of John on the point of walking up the river of life into the new Jerusalem. It depicts the seven seals, seven golden candlesticks, seven angels and seven trumpets – and, of course, the four horsemen, who are released by the opening of the first four seals. The tapestry tells the story of the book through the eyes of John, who is present in almost all of the panels. It marks the final battle between good and evil: Satan as a dragon and Christ as a lamb. Revelation was written by Saint John the Divine, who had been banished by the Romans to the Aegean island of Patmos (apparently after being plunged into boiling oil in Rome and suffering no injuries). However, it was brought out, mounted on six wooden pedestals, for special occasions such as the marriage of Louis’s son, Louis II of Anjou, to Yolande of Aragon at Arles in 1400. ![]() This epic work – the largest known medieval tapestry in the world – took nine years to complete but was kept in a chest and rarely shown. ![]() ![]() His designs were then woven into 100 separate tapestries by the workshops of Nicolas Bataille and Robert Poincon using vivid red, blue and gold woollen thread. In 1373, at the height of the hundred years war and not long after the Black Death, Louis instructed Hennequin de Bruges, a Flemish painter to the court of King Charles V, to draw a group of miniatures from the final book of the Bible.
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