Saturday, June 18, 2022

A Eucharistic Tapestry in France

Our friends of the Schola Sainte Cécile just posted to their Facebook page these photos of this splendid tapestry in one of the chapels of the cathedral of Saint-Vincent in Chalon-sur-Saône, France. This was made in the year 1510, and donated to the church by a family called Baichet, whose motto “Spes mea Deus” is seen on it in several places. Measuring over 22 feet high by 23½ wide, it was designed particularly to decorate the Sacrament chapel, presumably for both Holy Thursday and Corpus Christi, as seen in the first photo.
Above the center is shown the Blessed Sacrament exposed on an altar, with the members of the Baichet family kneeling in prayer before It.
The panels on the left side represent two episodes from the Old Testament traditionally understood a prefigurations of the Eucharist: the fall of the manna in Exodus 16...
and the priest Melchizedek offering tithes of bread and wine to Abraham after the battle in the valley of Siddim, as recounted in Genesis 14, and cited in Hebrews 7.
At the lower right is seen the celebration of the Jewish Passover...
and at the upper right, the Last Supper.
The following three images by GO69 are taken from Wikimedia Commons, and show three of the panels a bit more fully. (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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