In a basement gallery in a French provincial chateau stands the perfect artwork for our chilling times. The Apocalypse Tapestry is by turns grotesque and daunting. It is also mesmerising in its beauty and intricacy. Yet few people know about it, even in France; fewer still have visited it.

Commissioned by Louis I, the Duke of Anjou, in the late 14th century, the 90 different scenes tell the story of the Book of Revelation, the Bible’s last gasp of horror, retribution and redemption. It hangs in the city of Angers, in a dimly lit modern gallery at the foot of the castle. The story of how it got there, and how it has survived, is almost as dramatic as the visions it depicts.

In 1373, at the height of the hundred years war and not long after the Black Death, Louis instructed Hennequin de Bruges, a Flemish painter to the court of King Charles V, to draw a group of miniatures from the final book of the Bible. His designs were then woven into 100 separate tapestries by the workshops of Nicolas Bataille and Robert Poincon using vivid red, blue and gold woollen thread. This epic work – the largest known medieval tapestry in the world – took nine years to complete but was kept in a chest and rarely shown. However, it was brought out, mounted on six wooden pedestals, for special occasions such as the marriage of Louis’s son, Louis II of Anjou, to Yolande of Aragon at Arles in 1400.

Revelation was written by Saint John the Divine, who had been banished by the Romans to the Aegean island of Patmos (apparently after being plunged into boiling oil in Rome and suffering no injuries). It marks the final battle between good and evil: Satan as a dragon and Christ as a lamb. The tapestry tells the story of the book through the eyes of John, who is present in almost all of the panels. It depicts the seven seals, seven golden candlesticks, seven angels and seven trumpets – and, of course, the four horsemen, who are released by the opening of the first four seals. One of the most beautiful images, after all the blood and fury, is of John on the point of walking up the river of life into the new Jerusalem.

The Apocalypse Tapestry in situ. Photograph: Jaubert French Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

The present day was also woven into the tapestry. The house of Anjou is promoted through its heraldry; the fleur-de-lys symbolises a resurgent France in its battles with the English. Images of suffering abound. Europe had lost tens of millions in the plague. For Louis, the tapestry was “primarily a status symbol, a sign of wealth and power” says Dr Natasha O’Hear, whose book, Picturing the Apocalypse, is a study of two millennia of art inspired by the Book of Revelation. “People turned to Revelation in difficult times, as they are attracted by its deterministic world view and its black-and-white certainty,” adds O’Hear.

So what does Revelation – and what might the tapestry – tell us about our responses to Covid-19? Where better to turn than Fox News? On 18 March, as the pandemic was beginning to affect the United States, the TV station asked viewers: “Are we witnessing the end of the world?” It turned to a man called Tom Meyer, whom it described as “a Bible professor who has the Book of Revelation memorised”. Not quite yet, Meyer declared. “We should think of the current outbreak as a preview of things to come, the slightest taste of what life will be like during the great tribulation.”

Over the past few weeks, as people have had more time to reflect, discussions about human behaviour and causality have adopted a more urgent tone. To put it another way: is this pandemic a dress rehearsal for trials to come, a final warning perhaps?

When I visited the tapestry in February, none of this was on my mind, even as coronavirus was spreading across China and into South Korea. I was awed by the beauty and horror of the work. Now, in seeking to relate it to our present predicament, I spent a day of isolation reading Revelation.

And he opened the bottomless pit and there arose a smoke ... and there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth ... those which have not the seal of God in their foreheads should be tormented five months; and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.”

Jesus returns to Earth. Believers are raptured to heaven, and those left behind suffer seven (more) years of torment before the second death arrives for “the fearful and unbelieving, the abominable and murderers, and whoremongers and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars.”

“It’s a story for all times,” says Alistair Tresidder, vicar of St Luke’s church in north west London. “It has a happy ending, if you get through all the other bits. Revelation has seized the imagination of the artist down the ages.”

After Louis I’s tapestry, the accounts of Philip the Bold, Louis’s younger brother, record the commissioning of another set of six tapestries in 1386 from Poincon. Reformation, revolution, rebellions – the more dangerous the world, the more art fell back on Revelation. Albrecht Dürer’s cycle of 15 woodcuts at the end of the 15th century came at a time of pestilence and peasants’ revolts. The works of William Blake and James Gillray reflected fears that the upheaval of the French Revolution would arrive on British shores.

It wasn’t just bloodshed that caused artists to turn to Revelation. One of the great works of this genre is John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath, painted in 1853. The Bible describes how “the sun became black as sackcloth of hair and the moon became as blood”. Martin depicts a pile of rocks collapsing, sending people falling into an abyss. Some eight million people saw Martin’s works, a third of the British population at the time. According to William Feaver, art historian and author of a seminal work on Martin, the artist was reflecting a fear of machines, of lives torn asunder by rapid industrialisation.

The Great Day of His Wrath, by John Martin. Photograph: Guy Bell/Alamy Stock Photo

This appropriation of apocalyptic language and imagery has continued into the contemporary era. Hollywood’s many blockbuster disaster movies have reflected dystopia from nuclear attack to financial meltdown to the climate emergency. O’Hear points out that some are more directly based in Revelation than others. She cites as example the video game Darksiders, released in 2010, which draws on the four horseman of the apocalypse and the evil angel Abaddon for some of its characters.

But she insists that nowhere is the story more vividly told than on the tapestry in Angers. For those who don’t know the Revelation text, “no better introduction could be imagined”, she says. The sheer scale of the work – each panel is around two metres high – draws you in. You feel as if you are walking alongside John’s visions, becoming absorbed and overpowered at the same time.

It is remarkable that the tapestry still exists, given that during the French Revolution it was looted, cut into pieces and used as floor mats and blankets for horses. The pieces were gathered back by a canon of the cathedral and all but 16 were found and restored.

It has been at its present site since the 1950s. “When you come you are overwhelmed by it,” says Emma Fonteneau, education officer at the castle. Last year the Chateau registered 261,000 visitors, which is a fairly small total given the importance of the work. She admits: “Some people don’t know it’s here, even some in the town.” French school pupils study the more famous tapestry at Bayeux, depicting the Norman conquest of England.

The castle is planning to build a new interpretation centre within its grounds. It was scheduled to open in June, but now who knows when? It is also involved in a series of partnerships with Google to digitise the work. Last year, it launched a successful Night of the Apocalypse, coinciding with European Museum Night. For the most part, however, visitors still have to rely on group tour guides for explanation.

I, for one, will be back in Angers as soon as I can. The tapestry tells you all you need to know about fear – and hope. O’Hear suggests that audiences from the middle ages to Victorian times might have been less alarmed by works such as this, such was the near-universal belief in the Revelation story. “The difference between then and now is that then they had an unshakeable belief in the new Jerusalem. It was a happy ending. In a way, for them it was serene.”