Last week’s post ended with this rather strange picture of the Virgin Mary sitting in a garden with a unicorn in her lap and the Angel Gabriel dressed as a hunter chasing after it with dogs.

 

 

 

 

I asked what was going on, and this week I’m going to try and explain the story, as well as show how and why unicorns had a place in the mediaeval garden and beyond, including on the wall.

No-one knows the exact origins of the mythical unicorn   but there are depictions of a single horned beast  in the ancient civilisations of the Indus Valley from around 2000BC, and Ctesius the 5thc BC Greek writer reported that : “There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses, and larger.  Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue.  They have a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length….The animal is exceedingly swift and powerful so that no creature neither the horse nor any other, can overtake it.”

 

Although unicorns found no place in the classic literature of Greece or Rome they continue to make the occasional appearance  in various forms in travellers tales from then on, until by the Middle Ages they were well-established in popular culture.  They were not, however, always seen as the friendly creature of modern children’s books and films, but rather as creatures with several divergent, often contradictory traits.

 

Unicorns  were  thought to be elusive and live in forests and woods. They were  best known for their supposed ferocity, their speed and invincibility, and for the therapeutic property of their horn. Contemporary texts described this as having the power to cure the sick, and in particular to detoxify poisoned water.  This purification was said to be akin  to Moses sweetening the water the Israelites found in the desert during the Exodus. More significantly it was thought to be like Christ’s own purification of the world after it had been corrupted by Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden.  For that reason some images of Eden even  include a unicorn amongst the creatures that live in the garden alongside Adam and Eve.

So strong was the belief in the horn’s miraculous cures  that, since of course, unicorns horns didn’t actually exist,  the tusk of a  narwhal was often passed off as the real thing.   Sometimes known as sea-unicorns narwhals are  small whales native to the Arctic.  The horn was usually powdered and used in medicines designed as antidotes to poisons, or sometimes carved to form cups to prevent poisoning. Additionally unicorn horn was  thought to strengthen your heart, relieve headaches, deter the plague and pestilence, as well as cure measles, small pox, and the  “falling sickness” in children.

For more on this see the article on Cambridge University’s Research webpages: What is a unicorn’s horn made of?    Chelsea Clark’s 2012 article: The Wonders of Unicorn Horns: Prevention and Cures for poisons. and Anne Ewbank’s 2018 article The Strange History of Royals Testing Food for Poison With Unicorn Horn

On the other hand  unicorns were seen as noble beasts, which epitomised purity  in a reflection of their white colouring. It was said that a unicorn could only be captured and tamed by a virgin. The unicorn would soon pick up the scent of her innocence if she came into the forest, then track her down and quickly become docile and loving in her presence,  laying its head in her lap.  The lap of the Virgin Mary was, of course, closely associated with the Christ Child and that gave the unicorn another link with Christ and his incarnation.  It was St Ambrose, the great fourth-century theologian, who probably first equated the unicorn with Christ. ‘Who is this unicorn but God’s only son?…The only word of God who has been close to God from the beginning.”

There are descriptions too in mediaeval bestiaries of Christ as ‘the spiritual unicorn’ and although most translation of the Song of Songs refer to “My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag” rather than unicorn that was enough for some commentators to connect the  imagery in a way they thought suitable.

 

So what’s going on with the depictions of the angel Gabriel as a hunter chasing the poor unicorn with dogs?   In fact it’s the opposite of what it might appear, and in images the  dogs are variously named/ identified as virtues such as Truth, Justice, Peace, or Mercy. This means Gabriel is not hunting the unicorn to kill it but instead  is driving  it into the garden  so that it can find Mary and rest it head in her lap – for which read womb.  So it is actually another rendering of the Annunciation story. Gabriel still appears, and brings Christ in the form of a unicorn to the virgin – and so the whole scene  symbolises the immaculate conception.

Although as we see today and  last week unicorns make an  appearance in  some paintings of the hortus conclusus and  the annunciation their most famous appearances are in  two major sets of late 15thc  tapestries.

The first set dating from the 1480s is “The Lady and the Unicorn” which has six tapestries one about each of the senses – that’s the five you know about – sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell – and one that you probably didn’t which is labelled  “À mon seul désir” (To my only desire) which has inspired countless theories, the  most likely being a mix of the spiritual and erotic meaning of the words – an internal longing of the heart.

As material objects, they are quite breathtaking.   Probably woven in the southern Netherlands from extremely high quality wool and silk they would have cost a fortune to produce, and  imply royal or extremely wealthy patronage.  The banners that appear throughout the series carry the arms of the Le Viste family who presumably were the commissioners. But why they should have spent so much and what was being celebrated is unclear.

Each tapestry has a quite static posed scene which includes a beautifully dressed young woman and her servant,  together with a lion and a unicorn, often holding  banners, and often others animals including a monkey. They all stand  in a flower-filled  enclosed garden demarcated in dark green and against an unusual bright red background that is covered with an almost hypnotic pattern of plants, birds and animals.

This kind of patterning, known as Millefleurs,  literally “thousand flowers” was a short-lived  stylistic phenomenon at the very end of the Middle Ages/beginning of the Renaissance  although it was revived by  William  Morris  in the 19th century.

The backgrounds contain specimen trees  which have been identified as being oak (Quercus robus), holly (Ilex aquifolium), sour orange (Citrus aurantium), and the stone pine (Pinus pinea).

The tapestries were “discovered” in a poor state at the   château de Boussac in the Creuse region of France in the 1840s.  The author George Sand had visited and  bought them to much wider public notice in her 1844 novel  Jeanne which is set in and around the chateau. She also prompted her friend and fellow writer  Prosper Merimee – who also happened to be Inspector-General of Historic Monuments – to  visit Boussac.  He immediately recognised their value although it was not until 1882 that they were acquired by the Musee de Cluny, France’s museum of the mediaeval world, for 25,500 francs and where they are now the star attraction.

The last panel [below] is in a slightly different style and has the lady standing in the entrance to a tented pavilion.

Above her head is embroidered the motto  “À Mon Seul Désir”, the exact meaning of which is unclear, although which can be literally translated as  “to my only/sole desire”, “according to my desire alone”;  or perhaps “by my will alone.”

 

The  maidservant is holding open a chest and the lady is either placing the necklace she wears in the other tapestries, back in  the chest, or perhaps is taking it out.  That has been interpreted as a renunciation of the passions aroused by the other senses, or perhaps  as an assertion of her own free will.

It’s long been thought that the  series  can be seen as a visual meditation on earthly pleasures and courtly culture rather than having any great religious or other significance, but there are others who have sought to find an underlying motivating narrative.

Andre Arnaud suggested in 1981 that the lady was none other than Mary, the sister of Henry VIII, and, for a short few months, the wife of Louis XII of France.  After her husband’s death she was to marry Charles Brandon, Duke of Sussex, without Henry’s permission.  Arnaud suggests that various elements in the tapestries tell her story.  This theory was later outlined on-line by Jacky Lorette.

More recently Yuki Fukazawa a Japanese/Australian  scholar has  suggested that they tell the story of Joan of Arc and the struggle to free France from English rule and unite it as a single kingdom.  It might sound a bit far fetched but its definitely worth reading her interpretation in full.

The second major series of tapestries are very different in style and subject, although they only date from a few years later, probably being made between 1490 and 1505 in Brussels.  There were  originally seven complete panels, although one was damaged with  just two sections surviving.  Who originally commissioned them is not known but it’s likely the first and last were designed by a different artist to the rest, perhaps as afterthoughts.

The most popular theory is that  they were made to celebrate one of the  weddings of  Duchess Anne, the last ruler of an independent Brittany who married  two kings of France. Although there is no direct evidence for that assertion,  the letters A and a reversed E linked  by a knotted cord which appears several times resemble other images of her name.

Together the seven tapestries  tell, at least superficially, the story of a hunt for a unicorn, but, as always,  there is more to it than that.

The first panel which shows the start of the hunt is  set, like the Lady and the Unicorn series, against a millefleurs background, this time in dark green speckled with  trees and flowers. As many as 101 different species of plants can be seen in the series,  85 which have been identified, including the cherry tree behind the hunters and rather surprisingly a date palm which can be seen in front of the sniffing hounds in the bottom right just above the A & reversed E.

In the second panel  the hunters have discovered their quarry  by a fountain. It is kneeling down with its horn in the water flowing from the fountain to purify it.   Roundabout are plants noted in medieval herbals as antidotes to poisoning, such as sage, pot marigolds, and orange.

The next scene is  chaotic  and shows the hunters attacking the unicorn who, wounded, tries to escape by leaping across a stream.  The ferocity of the battle is conveyed by the converging lances aimed at the animal, the sounding of the hunting horns, and the menacing hounds. The whole resembles depiction of stag hunts – a pursuit reserved for the elite – and has  palatial buildings in the background.

The gruesome nature of the hunt is continued in tapestry 4 and its worth noting the horn-blowing hunter at the lower left wears a scabbard with the inscription AVE REGINA C[OELI] (Hail, Queen of the Heavens) before the poor unicorn is killed off in the left hand section of tapestry 5.

Immediately behind its head is a holly tree which is often used a symbol of Christ’s Passion, and suggests that the unicorn is an allegory for Christ. Are its wounds another link? The main section of the panel has the body being carried back to the castle – with its horn already cut off and tangled up with leaves reminiscent of the crown of thorns  – to be presented to the lord and his lady in front of a large crowd.

So just as last week the message is simple. Don’t take mediaeval art at face value – there’s always another message to be read, especially when it includes unicorns!

Unlike many posts if you want to know more you’ll be spoiled for choice. There are lots of accounts of the various tapestries, and histories of unicorns on the web. Not all are that accurate, so be careful, but, apart from the links to the museum collections that I’ve included the following are good places to start further reading: 

For more on the plants shown in the tapestries see The Fruits and Nuts of the Unicorn Tapestries by Jules Janick and Anna Whipkey;  The Unicorn Tapestries by Margaret Freeman [1976] and The Unicorn Tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Adolph Cavallo [1998]. For the Cluny tapestries:  The Lady and the Unicorn by Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, [1986] and, of course,  there’s  the  fictional account in Tracey Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicorn [2004]