Miniature from a Manuscript of the Apocalypse: The Woman Clothed with the Sun and The War in Heaven (c. 1295): Art, History and Details

Miniature from a Manuscript of the Apocalypse: The Woman Clothed with the Sun and The War in Heaven (c. 1295) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The visionary text of St. John the Evangelist's Apocalypse, the final book of the New Testament, inspired these images of salvation, sin, and divine retribution. A large number of illustrated volumes of the Apocalypse appeared in Northern Europe, especially in England, after the year 1240--perhaps reflecting a fear of the world's end. These miniatures come from a manuscript produced in Lorraine, then artistically influenced by English models.

Object facts

• Title: Miniature from a Manuscript of the Apocalypse: The Woman Clothed with the Sun and The War in Heaven
• Date: c. 1295
• Culture: France, Lorraine
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera, and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Sheet: 12 x 14.2 cm (4 3/4 x 5 9/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1983.73.2

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Freyham, R. "Joachism and the English Apocalypse," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XVIII (1955).
• De Winter, Patrick M. “Visions of the Apocalypse in Medieval England and France.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 70, no. 10 (1983).
• "Englische Miniaturenfolge aus dem 13. Jahrhundert," Artis-kunstmarkt Auktionen (April 1983).

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.