Bible in art · Revelation

Revelation of St. John: The Woman Clothed with the Sun

Dürer · 1511
The Cleveland Museum of Art

Dürer cut this sheet of the Apocalypse around 1496–98; the impression is from the 1511 edition.

He puts several moments of Revelation 12 side by side. The woman stands on the moon in a blaze of light, crowned with stars and already given wings. The seven-headed dragon faces her, spitting water, its tail sweeping stars out of the sky, while angels carry her child up to God.

From the text

“a woman clothed in the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars” (Revelation 12:1)
A dragon with seven heads and ten horns whose tail sweeps a third of the stars (Revelation 12:3–4)
The child caught up to God; water from the dragon’s mouth (Revelation 12:5, 12:15)

The artist’s own

The eagle’s wings (Revelation 12:14) already on the woman’s shoulders at the start
Hatching in long straight rays for the light of the sun

Details

The woman

Winged, crowned with stars, standing on a crescent moon.

The child

Angels lift the baby in a cloth towards God in the clouds.

The dragon

Seven crowned heads; one pours out a stream of water.

The tail

The long tail curls up into the stars.

Albrecht Dürer, German, 1471–1528. The Cleveland Museum of Art (Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland, 1922.94.12) · Woodcut · Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access: Collection API record "share_license_status": "CC0" (Creative Commons Zero, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).

The verses

Rev 12:1–6And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed in the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and crying out in the pain and agony of giving birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: a huge red dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven royal crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars from the sky, tossing them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, ready to devour her child as soon as she gave birth. And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was caught up to God and to His throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where God had prepared a place for her to be nourished for 1,260 days.

Rev 12:13–16And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. But the woman was given two wings of a great eagle to fly from the presence of the serpent to her place in the wilderness, where she was nourished for a time, and times, and half a time. Then from the mouth of the serpent spewed water like a river to overtake the woman and sweep her away in the torrent. But the earth helped the woman and opened its mouth to swallow up the river that had poured from the dragon’s mouth.

See it at the museum’s site