In honor of the feast of St John at the Latin Gate, here is a very beautiful illuminated manuscript which I stumbled across on the website of the Bibliothèque national de France (Département des Manuscrits, Néerlandais 3), made 1400. It contains the book of the Apocalypse in a Flemish translation, with an elaborately decorated page before each chapter; these illustrations were done by two different anonymous artists.
The first decorated page shows episodes from the apocryphal acts of St John: preaching outside a church; the baptism of a follower named Drusiana; his trial before a Roman proconsul; his martyrdom by being thrown in a pot of boiling oil, the event which is commemorated in today’s feast; his deportation to the Greek island of Patmos, where he receives the visions recorded in the Apocalypse.
Chapter 3, the letters to Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicia.
Chapter 4, the vision of God the Father on His throne; in this and the following image, the figures of the twenty-four elders are merged into the blue background.
Chapter 5, the Lamb before the throne, with the symbolic animals of the four evangelists.
Chapter 7, the four angels holding back the four winds, and the adoration of the Lamb before the throne of God.
Chapter 8, the opening of the seventh seal, and the sounding of the four trumpets.
Chapter 9, the fifth and sixth trumpets, and the animals that come up from the abyss upon the earth.
Chapter 10, the appearance of the angel with his face like the sun; St John receives the book from the angel.
Chapter 11, the two witnesses; on the right side, the sounding of the seventh trumpet, which very cleverly sticks out of the margin of the picture.
Chapter 12, the woman clothed with the sun and the red dragon, and the fight between the dragon and St Michael.
Chapter 13, the beast from the sea, and the beast from the land.
Chapter 14, the Lamb on Mt Sion, and the judgement of Babylon.
Chapter 15, the just sing in praise of God.
Chapter 16, the seven vials of the wrath of God.
At this point, there has been a displacement in the manuscript, and the folios are out of order, so chapter 20 appears next, the binding of Satan for 1000 years, the reign of Christ, and Satan’s final release.
Chapter 21, the vision of the city with the Lamb within it.
Chapter 17, the vision of the woman on the beast with seven heads, and the judgement of Babylon.
Chapter 18, the lamentation over the destruction of Babylon.
Chapter 19, the vision of Christ as the rider on the white horse.
Chapter 22, the final vision of the great river of the water of life, coming forth from the seat of God and the Lamb.
A sample of the text; each page has one decorated letter at the beginning, and some decoration coming out of it, but nothing more elaborate than this.
