The Apocalypse: The Opening of the Seventh Seal (1561): Art, History and Details

The Apocalypse: The Opening of the Seventh Seal (1561) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean Duvet (French, 1485–1561).

The work and its context

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

Jean Duvet was a goldsmith in Dijon, France, before taking up engraving. The relationship between the goldsmith’s art and that of the engraver is easily observed in this image of the opening of the seventh seal, a dramatic apocalyptic event at the end of the Book of Revelation from the New Testament. Figures crowd onto the image’s surface as they might appear on a metal plaque. Working outside the primary printmaking centers of Northern Europe and Italy, Duvet had little access to other printmakers and probably learned to engrave by studying prints by other masters. This is evident in his reliance on compositional elements derived from Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut series The Apocalypse.

Object facts

• Title: The Apocalypse: The Opening of the Seventh Seal
• Date: 1561
• Creator attribution: Jean Duvet (French, 1485–1561)
• Culture: France
• Type: Print
• Technique: engraving
• Dimensions: Framed: 52.4 x 39.7 x 2.5 cm (20 5/8 x 15 5/8 x 1 in.); Unframed: 32.5 x 24.3 cm (12 13/16 x 9 9/16 in.); Plate: 30.2 x 21.9 cm (11 7/8 x 8 5/8 in.)
• Collection: PR - Engraving
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1930.531

Collection credit

Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Am Engraving by Jean Duvet." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 18, no. 1 (January 1931): 13-16.

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.