# The Apocalypse Tapestry > Workshop of Nicolas Bataille, after designs by Hennequin de Bruges (Jean Bondol) - designed from 1373; woven in Paris c. 1377-1382 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/hennequin-de-bruges-nicolas-bataille/apocalypse-tapestry-angers/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-15 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Workshop of Nicolas Bataille, after designs by Hennequin de Bruges (Jean Bondol) - **Date:** designed from 1373; woven in Paris c. 1377-1382 - **Medium:** Wool and silk on a wool warp, tapestry-woven in the high-warp (haute-lisse) technique of the Parisian workshops of this period; metal-wrapped threads of silver originally gilded with gold have been identified in fragments separated from the main hanging - **Dimensions:** Originally six pieces, each about 24 m wide by 6 m high, for a total usually given as approximately 140 m long by 6 m high (one source gives 144 m; total area is given as approximately 800 to 850 sq m across sources). Approximately 100 to 103 m of the original length is on display today, at a reduced height of about 4.5 m. - **Object type:** Textile - **Period:** French, Gothic, late fourteenth century (Valois) - **Current location:** Chateau d'Angers, Domaine national du Chateau d'Angers, Centre des monuments nationaux, Angers, Pays de la Loire, France, displayed in the purpose-built gallery opened in 1954 - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A monumental set of six tapestries illustrating the Book of Revelation, woven in wool and silk in Paris around 1377 to 1382 for Louis I, Duke of Anjou, after designs by the court painter Hennequin de Bruges and financed through the merchant Nicolas Bataille. At roughly 140 metres in its original length, it is the oldest and largest surviving monumental tapestry cycle from medieval Europe, and one of only two substantial fourteenth-century tapestry sets to survive at all.Removed from Angers Cathedral's choir in 1767 and neglected even before the Revolution, it was cut into pieces during the revolutionary period and put to documented, unglamorous uses: protecting an abbey's orange trees from frost, covering horses, serving as a sacristy doormat, patching cathedral walls. The popular story that Bishop Angebault personally bought it back from customs in 1843 for 300 francs does not, on the fullest documentary account available, match the archival record; the real recovery ran through an earlier restitution around 1803, damp storage at the old seminary, and Canon Joubert's 1848 rediscovery, with Angebault's genuine role beginning only with the restoration he backed from 1849.Two nineteenth-century restoration campaigns, a purpose-built gallery opened in 1954, a 1980s discovery that its reverse face had kept its original colour intact, and the 2020 rediscovery of thirty fragments that had sat unrecognised in a Paris dealer's reserve since 1924, bring the story into the present. It is a wholly different object from both the Bayeux Tapestry and the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the Musee de Cluny, sharing with them only the word 'tapestry'. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1373-1382** Louis I, Duke of Anjou (patron) `[documented]` (commission and weaving) Commissioned by Louis I of Anjou; designed by Hennequin de Bruges (Jean Bondol), court painter to Charles V, drawing in part on an illuminated Apocalypse manuscript lent by Charles V in 1373; woven in a Paris workshop financed through the merchant Nicolas Bataille. Substantially complete by 1380 or 1382; reported cost 6,000 francs. - **1382-1474** House of Anjou `[documented]` (inheritance within the family) Retained within the House of Anjou following Louis I's death in 1384 until the testament of King Rene of Anjou in 1474. - **1474-1480** Chateau de Bauge, then Angers Cathedral `[documented]` (bequest and transfer) Bequeathed under Rene of Anjou's 1474 testament; held at the Chateau de Bauge from 1476; transferred to Angers Cathedral in 1480 under authorisation from King Louis XI. A 1505 inventory records six pieces from Rene's bequest and a seventh added from Anne of France in 1490. - **1480-1767** Chapter of Angers Cathedral `[documented]` (display at major festivals) Displayed at the cathedral's principal feast days for close to three centuries. - **1767-1782** Chapter of Angers Cathedral `[documented]` (removal and attempted sale) Removed from the choir in 1767, reportedly on grounds that it was interfering acoustically with the singing; offered for sale in 1782 at a low price, with no buyer found. - **1789-c. 1803** Unrecovered, dispersed in pieces `[documented]` (revolutionary seizure and repurposing) Dispersed and cut into pieces during the revolutionary period. Specific documented uses, per Rene Planchenault's 1966 study as cited in the fullest secondary account available: winter protection for the orange trees of the Abbey of Saint-Serge, a covering for horses, a doormat in the sacristy of the convent of the Sisters of Wisdom, and material to conceal damage in the walls of Angers Cathedral. Read through a secondary citation of Planchenault rather than the monograph itself; flagged for direct verification. - **1843** Bishop Guillaume Angebault (popular account, disputed) `[disputed]` (claimed customs purchase for 300 francs) Xavier Barbier de Montault and Jules Guiffrey wrote that Bishop Angebault personally bought the tapestry back from the customs administration in 1843 for 300 francs and bequeathed it to the chapter, a version still repeated in tourism-facing material today. The fullest documentary account available for this record, citing Louis de Farcy's 1889 institutional history, states explicitly that this does not correspond to the archival documents. This record follows the documented sequence in the surrounding entries rather than this popular version. - **c. 1803-1848** Diocese of Angers `[documented]` (restitution, storage, and deterioration) Restitution of the tapestry to the church was obtained around 1803 under Bishop Montault-Desilles. It was then stored at the former Angers seminary under Toussaint Grille's custody, where it deteriorated in damp conditions rather than being displayed or actively conserved. - **1848** Diocese of Angers `[documented]` (rediscovery) Canon Joubert rediscovered the tapestry in poor condition at the former seminary and reported the find to Bishop Guillaume Angebault on 8 June 1848. - **1849-1863** Chapter of Angers Cathedral `[documented]` (first restoration campaign) Canon Louis-Francois Joubert led restoration from 1849; his February 1849 inventory listed 55 pieces. Old linings were removed, revealing seven further scenes; misordered tableaus were rearranged to follow the biblical text; the pieces were washed in the river Maine, causing colour loss to the front. Joubert's own retissing proved controversial and was supervised from 1852 by the architect Charles Joly-Leterme, with replacement wool from the Gobelins Manufactory under Adrien-Leon Lacordaire. - **1869-1870** Chapter of Angers Cathedral `[documented]` (second restoration and return to display) A more invasive restoration under Louis de Farcy, working with Canon Alexandre Machefer and a formal conservation commission, completely rewove missing scenes over the following decades. The tapestry returned to display at the cathedral in 1870; two restored panels were exhibited at the Union centrale des beaux-arts in 1876. - **1952-1954** French state, via the Chateau d'Angers `[documented]` (transfer and new gallery) Custody passed from the diocese to the state under a 1952 agreement. A purpose-built L-shaped gallery designed by the architect Bernard Vitry was constructed in 1953-1954 at the Chateau d'Angers, replacing older castle buildings; the tapestry went on display there in 1954. - **1975-1996** Centre des monuments nationaux `[documented]` (gallery modifications) Original gallery windows, found to be causing sun damage, were curtained over in 1975. A more thorough remount followed in 1996, displaying scenes at two heights against dark blue walls with pale edging under environmental controls (about 19 C, about 40 lux, managed humidity). Further lighting and ventilation improvements followed between 1990 and 2000. - **1980s** Centre des monuments nationaux `[documented]` (reverse-face examination) Conservation examination found the reverse of the weave undamaged and as vividly coloured as the front had originally been, confirming the tapestry was woven without a distinct right and wrong side. - **2016-2017** Centre des monuments nationaux / French Ministry of Culture `[documented]` (condition assessment) A comprehensive condition assessment of the tapestry was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and completed in 2017. - **2020-2021** Ratton-Ladriere gallery, then the French state `[documented]` (fragment rediscovery and donation) Thirty fragments, held since a 1924 acquisition from the dealer Otto Wegener, were found during the 2020 lockdown and matched to the main hanging by motif, colour, weave-density comparison and metallic-thread analysis. Donated to the French state in May 2021. - **2023-present** Chateau d'Angers, Centre des monuments nationaux, French state `[documented]` (UNESCO Memory of the World inscription and current display) Inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World international register in 2023. Remains on public display at the Chateau d'Angers in the 1954 gallery as most recently modified. ## Open questions - Whether the tapestry originally comprised 90 scenes, the figure most often repeated, or 84, implied by some accounts of its two-registers-per-piece structure, and correspondingly whether 71 or 75 scenes survive today whole or in part: the sources reviewed disagree and this record could not reconcile them to a single settled catalogue figure. - What precisely justifies the widely repeated 'about one third lost' figure for the hanging's length: the underlying numbers (an original length of 140 or 144 m against a surviving length of 100 or 103 m) support a loss of somewhere between roughly a quarter and just under a third, and a single authoritative measurement reconciling them was not found in the sources consulted. - Where and under whose custody the tapestry was kept between the failed 1782 sale attempt and Bishop Montault-Desilles's restitution of it to the church around 1803 is not detailed in the sources reviewed. - Whether further fragments beyond the thirty recovered from the Ratton-Ladriere gallery in 2020 remain unrecognised in other private or dealer collections, given that this group alone went unidentified for roughly a century after entering the art market in 1924. - How far the reading of the tapestry as pro-Clementist commentary on the Western Schism, and the claim that Louis I's L and M monogram appears programmatically across the cycle rather than in an isolated scene, holds up against the primary iconographic scholarship; the specialist literature (attributed to Peter K. Klein in a secondary source) was not directly consulted for this record. - Whether the murex-derived purple dye reported in a small number of panels reflects the original 1370s-80s weaving or a later repair or re-dyeing campaign: the claim rests on secondary blog reporting of research attributed to a Dr Kurt Heinisch and could not be verified here against a primary scientific publication. - Whether Robert Poincon can be securely documented as the technical head of the specific workshop that wove this commission, or whether that attribution belongs to the Parisian tapestry trade of the period more generally: this record could not verify it against the primary payment records referenced only secondhand in the sources consulted. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'Apocalypse Tapestry' (English). A tertiary consolidation citing Campbell and Ainsworth, Jean Mesqui, Bausum, Benton, and Belozerskaya; flagged for replacement with those monographs directly. - [2] Wikipedia, 'Tenture de l'Apocalypse' (French). A tertiary article, but the richest single account found for the recovery, restoration and display history; itself citing Louis de Farcy's 1889 'Histoire et description des tapisseries de la Cathedrale d'Angers', Rene Planchenault's 1966 'L'Apocalypse d'Angers', and Leon de Joannis's 1864 study. Flagged for replacement with those primary works directly wherever possible. - [3] UNESCO, 'Apocalypse Tapestry of Angers', Memory of the World register entry, inscribed 2023. - [4] Chateau d'Angers (Centre des monuments nationaux), 'The tapestry of the Apocalypse: the essential in 2 minutes!' - [5] Chateau d'Angers (Centre des monuments nationaux), 'Une decouverte miraculeuse: les fragments perdus de l'Apocalypse', on the 2020 rediscovery and 2021 donation of thirty fragments. - [6] Chateau d'Angers (Centre des monuments nationaux), 'Dans les coulisses du patrimoine... Restaurer la plus grande tapisserie du monde!', on the 2016-2017 condition assessment. - [7] Brewminate, 'The Medieval Apocalypse Tapestry of Louis I, Duke of Anjou'. A secondary account citing Jean Mesqui, Peter K. Klein, and Susan Groag Bell among its bibliography; the underlying named studies were not consulted directly for this record. - [8] Needleprint (blog), 'The Apocalypse Tapestry of Angers and the Mystery of the Forgotten Murex Dye'. A tertiary blog account reporting research attributed to Dr Kurt Heinisch; flagged for replacement with the underlying scientific publication, which this record could not locate directly. - [9] Selvedge Magazine, 'Tapestry Tales: The Apocalypse Tapestry, Angers'. A popular account, used here for the 1980s reverse-face conservation finding. - [10] Wikipedia, 'Jean Bondol'. A tertiary biography, used for the 1371 Bible of Jean de Vaudetar frontispiece and the artist's documented dates of activity. - [11] Wikimedia Commons file description pages and API metadata for the plates used in this record (Angers_Apocalypse_Tapestry_2007.jpg; Tapisserie_de_l'apocalypse.jpg; Angers-_Apocalypse_(1).JPG; Tenture_Apocalypse_Angers_cavalier_3.jpg; Tenture_Apocalypse_Angers_cavalier_4.jpg; La_tenture_de_lApocalypse_(Angers)_(2).jpg), consulted for LicenseShortName and Artist fields. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.