The fire of Babylon and the mourning of the kings and merchants

This illustration, as in most stemma II Beatus, covers two folios. Folio 215v, with the legend “vbi babilon it est iste mundus/ardet”, a paraphrase of the explanatio680, at the top, shows the angel flying and pointing in a discursive gesture at the city of Babylon represented as a walled city consisting of a large face with two sections and a gabled roof crowned by crenellations and flanked by large buttresses, full of fire – represented by wavy, red and blue lines – with a large opening in the form of a horseshoe arch containing a closed, wooden gate with iron rivets, surrounded mainly by two pairs of twin horseshoe arches with a rectangular frame. The jugs and cups that can be seen inside bel...