Apocalypse Tapestry
Tenture de l'Apocalypse
Interesting facts
- The tapestry is woven so that its reverse is essentially identical to the front, a feat that shows the extraordinary skill of its weavers.
- Its wool was dyed with plants: weld for the yellows, madder for the reds and woad for the blues.
- Before it was cut up, the whole set covered roughly 850 square metres of wall.
- In 1767 the hangings were taken down in the cathedral, partly because they were thought to muffle the singing of the choir.
- The cathedral chapter put the tapestry up for sale in 1782, but no buyer came forward.
- When the canon who rescued it inspected it in 1848, it had been chopped into fifteen pieces with 58 scenes stitched together in no logical order.
- Louis II of Anjou used the tapestry in 1400 to decorate the archbishop’s palace in Arles for his wedding.
- Each of the six pieces originally opened with a tall figure seated under a canopy, a reader introducing the visions that follow.
- Some riders in the scenes wear English-style helmets, which historians read as veiled jibes at France’s enemy in the Hundred Years’ War.
- In 2023 UNESCO added the Apocalypse Tapestry to its Memory of the World register.
Why it is worth it
Angels and dragons, plagues and horsemen: the Apocalypse Tapestry spreads the visionary drama of the Book of Revelation along a darkened gallery inside the castle of Angers. It is the largest set of medieval tapestries to survive anywhere and almost the only great hanging left from the fourteenth century, when the French princes of the House of Valois owned tapestries by the hundred and nearly all of them have since vanished.
Louis I, Duke of Anjou, brother of King Charles V, commissioned the work around 1373. The designs came from the Flemish court painter Jean Bondol, who drew partly on an illuminated Apocalypse manuscript from the royal library, and the weaving was arranged through the Paris merchant Nicolas Bataille in a workshop run by Robert Poinçon. The set cost 6,000 francs and was finished around 1380–82. It originally formed six sections, each about six metres high, with ninety scenes set against alternating red and blue grounds and a total length of some 140 metres. Weaving it took an estimated fifty to eighty-four person-years. The figures are slightly larger than life, full of movement and colour, and some of the imagery is unusual for its time: the fourth horseman, Death, appears as a rotting corpse rather than as a living rider.
The tapestry has survived against the odds. René of Anjou bequeathed it to Angers Cathedral in 1480, but during the French Revolution it was cut up and the pieces put to humble uses, from floor mats to frost covers for orange trees and padding in horse stables. The surviving fragments were recovered in 1848 and returned to the cathedral, and in 1954 they moved to a purpose-built gallery in the castle. Today 71 of the original 90 scenes remain; the front has faded, while the back still shows the deep original colours. The setting is apt: the fortress of the Counts and Dukes of Anjou, rebuilt under Louis IX in the thirteenth century with seventeen massive towers of pale stone and dark slate, rises above the river Maine in the heart of Angers, the historic capital of Anjou.
Getting there
The tapestry is displayed in the Château d'Angers, about 0.6 km from the centre of Angers. Angers Saint-Laud station is served by TGV trains on the line between Paris and Nantes. The nearest airport is Nantes Atlantique (NTE), about 87 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Apocalypse Tapestry is a large medieval set of tapestries commissioned by Louis I, Duke of Anjou, and woven in Paris between 1377 and 1382. It depicts the story of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation by Saint John the Divine in colourful images, spread over six tapestries that originally totalled 90 scenes, and were about six metres high, and 140 metres long in total.
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