One of the treasures of the Musee de la Renaissance at Ecouen is a set of tapestries depicting the Story of King David. Woven in Brussels during the 1520s, this is among the most remarkable surviving sets from the period and almost certainly belonged to Henry VIII. The subject was important to Henry. David, the anointed of God, was the biblical figure with whom he most closely identified and in one of the illuminations in his 1540 psalter Henry is depicted playing the harp, surely a reference to David.

As with most medieval and Renaissance depictions of biblical subjects, the events in the tapestries are made more real by being set in the present. They are in effect a panorama of contemporary court life. The architecture is a fusion of late gothic and Renaissance styles, as it would have been at the time; the costumes are courtly and contemporary; and the armour is in the latest fashions. Among the many things about them that would have been familiar to a courtier of the time was the ubiquitous presence of gold and silver and the tapestries show goldsmiths’ work in almost every scene: in buffets and dining wares, in shrines and altar plate, in gold chains.