The tapestry The wolf who made a city tremble shows a detailed landscape scene which composes a single story from foreground to background. In the foreground, there is a light pink, winding path that curves across the bottom of the image. Alongside the path are clusters of pale rocks with small orange flowers scattered among them. On the right side, a grey wolf sits pointing toward the middle of the scene. Slightly farther back a smaller dark wolf walks along the path.

To the left, a tall, dark tree with bare branches rises vertically, with a few thinner trees nearby. Behind these trees is a body of water with a textured surface suggesting ripples. Moving toward the middle ground, there are green hills with visible brush-like textures. Nestled among the hills is a small village composed of tightly packed buildings. Two sloping pale hills rise behind the village and atop the middle one another small, dark wolf sits. In the background, there are patchwork-like fields in shades of green and yellow, divided into rectangular sections. Beyond the fields are distant mountains and above, the sky transitions from warm colours near the horizon to deep blue at the top. A large, bright sun sits low in the sky, surrounded by orange, yellow, and pink hues. Dark, curved lines resembling birds or branches spread across the upper portion of the sky.

This painterly tapestry by Isabel Nolan is made in direct response to the 15th-century Sienese painter Sassetta and his work The Wolf of Gubbio. In Sassetta’s original, St. Francis of Assisi is shown taming a wolf that had been terrorizing the Italian town of Gubbio. According to the hagiography (saints' tale), St. Francis intervenes through calm address: he approaches the animal peacefully, makes the sign of the cross, and greets it as “Brother Wolf.”

Nolan’s tapestry reconfigures this story to remove the moment of direct encounter by humans but keeps the wolf’s presence. The scene is dispersed across a wide terrain where human communities and the natural, wild world sit adjacent without an obvious point of resolution. Through this shift, Nolan translates the earlier story of spiritual authority over nature into a contemporary reflection on our shared environment lived in coexistence. The tapestry shows a world where the boundary between human and nonhuman is not resolved through domination but through an ongoing, unresolved proximity, where peace is implied as a fragile balance with the wild ever near.

Panorama Europa presents the work of ten Irish artists who engage with traditions of European painting to explore contemporary identities and wider societal issues. The selected paintings, tapestry, sculptures and drawings reference works from Pre-Renaissance to Impressionism. The exhibition invites you to reflect on these art histories and consider how artists draw on diverse pictorial tropes to create new modes of representation.

Panorama Europa takes its name from a commissioned work for the University College Cork art collection by artist Claire Halpin which was developed in partnership with the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence for EU Integration and Citizens’ Rights. This complex painting evokes renowned works of art across a present-day canvas of events. As with all the works on display in the exhibition, history and tradition become grounds for reclamation and caution, reminding us to remember, and renew, the past.

Curated by Fiona Kearney and Katie O'Grady