The Lady and the Unicorn: reading the Cluny tapestries
If you only ever see one unicorn in your life, let it be one of these. Six large tapestries, woven in wool and silk around 1500, now hang in a dim rotunda at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. They are known collectively as La Dame à la licorne — The Lady and the Unicorn — and they are, quietly, one of the strangest things the Middle Ages left us.
Five of the six are easy enough to name. Each shows a noblewoman on a small blue island of flowers, flanked by a lion on one side and a unicorn on the other, and each stages one of the five senses. In Touch, the lady holds the unicorn's horn. In Taste, she takes a sweet from a dish while a parakeet waits. Smell gives her a wreath of carnations and a monkey stealing their scent; Hearing, a small portable organ; Sight, a mirror in which the unicorn gazes at its own reflection, front hooves resting in her lap.
That mirror panel is the one people stand in front of longest. The fierce beast of the bestiaries — the one no hunter could take by force — has folded itself down to look at itself in a glass held by a young woman. Whatever else the series is doing, it is interested in the moment a wild thing becomes tame, and in who does the taming.
The sixth tapestry refuses to behave. Above the lady's tent are stitched three words: À mon seul désir.
It is the sixth panel that has kept art historians arguing for over a century. The lady stands before a blue pavilion embroidered with the motto À mon seul désir — "to my only desire," or perhaps "by my will alone." She is either taking a necklace out of a casket or putting it back. Read one way, she is renouncing the jewels, and the sixth sense is the medieval "sixth sense" of the heart or the soul, set above the bodily five. Read the other way, she is choosing to adorn herself, and desire is being affirmed rather than refused. The tapestry is careful never to tell us which.
We do not even know for certain who commissioned them. The little banners and shields scattered through the millefleurs background carry the arms of the Le Viste family of Lyon, which narrows things but does not close the case. The weavings were probably made in the southern Netherlands, then the centre of European tapestry, from designs (the "cartoons") drawn in Paris. By the nineteenth century they were mouldering in the Château de Boussac, where the novelist George Sand saw them and wrote them up with enough enthusiasm to help save them for the nation.
What I keep coming back to is how little the unicorn here has to do with the monster of legend. There is no hunt, no maiden used as bait, no capture and killing. The violence has been drained out, and what is left is attention: a creature and a person looking very carefully at each other and at the world through the senses. For a myth that is usually about pursuit, that stillness feels like the more radical version.