Tapestries in the context of "Jacob Jordaens"

The Life of the Virgin, showing narrative scenes from the life of Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a common subject for pictorial cycles in Christian art, often complementing, or forming part of, a cycle on the Life of Christ. In both cases the number of scenes shown varies greatly with the space available. Works may be in any medium: frescoed church walls and series of old master prints have many of the fullest cycles, but panel painting, stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, stone sculptures and ivory carvings have many examples.

The Cloisters (also known as the Met Cloisters) is a museum in Fort Tryon Park, straddling the neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood, in Upper Manhattan, New York City. The museum specializes in European medieval art and architecture, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it contains a large collection of medieval artworks shown in the architectural settings of French monasteries and abbeys. Its buildings are centered around four cloisters—the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont, and Trie-sur-Baïse—that were acquired by American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard in France before 1913 and moved to New York. Barnard's collection was bought for the museum by financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. Other major sources of objects were the collections of J. P. Morgan and Joseph Brummer.

The museum's building was designed by the architect Charles Collens, on a site on a steep hill, with upper and lower levels. It contains medieval gardens and a series of chapels and themed galleries, including the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish, and Gothic rooms. The design, layout, and ambiance of the building are intended to evoke a sense of medieval European monastic life. It holds about 5,000 works of art and architecture, all European and mostly dating from the Byzantine to the early Renaissance periods, mainly during the 12th through 15th centuries. The objects include stone and wood sculptures, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, and panel paintings, of which the best known include the c. 1422 Early Netherlandish Mérode Altarpiece and the c. 1495–1505 Flemish The Unicorn Tapestries.

Jean-Baptiste Martin (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ batist maʁtɛ̃]; 1659, Paris – 8 October 1735, Paris), known as "Martin des Batailles" was a French painter, decorator and designer who specialized in drawings for tapestries. He was best known for battle scenes, hence his nickname.

Grayson Perry is an English artist. Known for ceramic vases, tapestries, and transvestism as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles".

Perry's vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects at odds with their attractive appearance. There is a strong autobiographical element in his work, in which images of Perry as Claire, his female alter ego, and Alan Measles, his childhood teddy bear, often appear. He has made a number of documentary television programmes and has curated exhibitions. He has published two autobiographies, Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (2007) and The Descent of Man (2016), written and illustrated a graphic novel, Cycle of Violence (2012), written a book about art, Playing to the Gallery (2014), and published his illustrated Sketchbooks (2016). Various books describing his work have been published. In 2013 he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures.

The Unicorn Tapestries or the Hunt of the Unicorn (French: La Chasse à la licorne) is a series of seven tapestries made in the Southern Netherlands around 1495–1505, and now in The Cloisters in New York City. They were possibly designed in Paris and woven in Brussels. They depict a group of noblemen and hunters in pursuit of a unicorn through an idealised French landscape. The tapestries were woven in wool, metallic threads, and silk. The vibrant colours, still evident today, were produced from dye plants: weld (yellow), madder (red), and woad (blue).

First recorded in 1680 in the Paris home of the Rochefoucauld family, the tapestries were looted during the French Revolution. Rediscovered in a barn in the 1850s, they were hung at the family's Château de Verteuil. Since then they have been the subject of intense scholarly debate about the meaning of their iconography, the identity of the artists who designed them, and the sequence in which they were meant to be hung. Although various theories have been put forward, currently nothing is known of their early history or provenance. Their dramatic but conflicting narratives have inspired multiple readings, from chivalric to Christological. Variations in size, style, and composition suggest they come from more than one set, linked by their subject matter, provenance, and the mysterious AE monogram which appears in each. One of the panels, "The Mystic Capture of the Unicorn", survives as just two fragments.

The Apocalypse Tapestry is a large medieval set of tapestries commissioned by Louis I, Duke of Anjou, and woven in Paris between 1377 and 1382. It depicts the story of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation by Saint John the Divine in colourful images, spread over six tapestries that originally totalled 90 scenes, and were about six metres high, and 140 metres long in total.

It is the most significant, and almost the only, survival from the first decades of the great period of tapestry, when the industry developed large workshops and represented the most effective art form for exhibiting the magnificence of royal patrons, not least because large tapestries were hugely expensive. The period began in about 1350, and lasted until at least the 17th century, as tapestry was gradually overtaken in importance by paintings. At this early point relatively few tapestries were made to designs specified by the patron, which seems clearly to have been the case here.