A Tale of Two Women

Rubens' 'The Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse'

Nigel Bruce

• 1 min read
Rubens' 'The Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse'

Rubens' The Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse (1623-24): a new Virgin Mary for the Counter-Reformation era. She is accompanied by the warrior Archangel Saint Michael, along with two other warrior women, and God is at the top. She is a Virgo Bellatrix who doesn't need weapons to triumph over evil.

Rubens-Virgin-as-Woman-of-the-Apocalypse
The Getty in Los Angeles

Notice the moon on which she stands and the blue shroud and that she has already delivered the Christ child. The lines in Revelation Chapter 12 (King James version) are:
1. And there appeared a great wonder in Heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:
2. And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

Peter Paul Rubens - (self-) "Portrait of the Artist" (1623), Royal Collection, London. Cropped.

Compare her dominance in the image above with her more passive role in the earlier Gothic image below, The Last Judgment by Stefan Lochner from around 1435, part of an altar in Cologne.

Lochner-Last-Judgment

For more on the Virgin Mary