The Apocalyptic Woman

Dürer cut this woodcut for his Apocalypse of 1498 and reissued it in 1511, and it shows the same scene as the Flamel sheet elsewhere in this archive, the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse, three hundred years earlier and in black and white. A woman stands in rays of light on a crescent moon; a dragon with seven crowned heads waits at the right; above, in clouds, God sits enthroned with angels round him, and a child is being carried up.

The first verse is the picture's plan: ‘a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars’. Dürer gives her a mandorla of straight rays for the sun, sets a thin crescent under her bare feet, and puts a ring of twelve stars round her hair. She is praying, her hands together, and she looks down and to the side, not at the dragon. She is the Virgin of every German altarpiece, and the chapter's woman, in one figure.

The dragon is drawn to the text's specification: ‘a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns: and on his heads seven diadems’. Seven heads rise on seven necks at the right, each crowned, and the horns are distributed among them. Its long tail whips up the right edge of the block into the sky, where stars are scattering, because the next verse says ‘his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered, that, when she should be delivered, he might devour her son.’ Dürer places it exactly there, at her feet, waiting.

What saves the child happens overhead. In the clouds God is enthroned in a glory, and angels fly in from both sides; one of them carries a small figure upward. That is verse five: ‘she brought forth a man child … and her son was taken up to God, and to his throne’. The chapter does not say angels did the carrying; it says the child was taken up. The angels are Dürer's, and the archive records them as his while giving the verse they illustrate.

The archive pairs this print with the coloured Flamel sheet of the same woman because the two together show what a source does to a picture. Dürer illustrates the chapter for a Bible-reading public and puts the whole of it on the page, the woman, the dragon, the stars, the child, the throne. The alchemists' designer of the eighteenth century keeps the woman and the dragon and drops the rest, because he wanted the scene to mean something else. Here nothing is dropped. The chapter is the meaning, and the archive gives it beside the marks.