Hunting the Unicorn

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Mixing of cultures is not new.  A few of us from Montclair, the retirement home where I live, went to the Meadows Museum in Dallas to see tapestries woven in Belgium in the 16th Century to celebrate a Portugese king’s victorious campaign in North Africa. 

Part of the exhibit was a movie showing how tapestries are woven.  A school in Great Britain teaches this ancient skill.  A group of students, women and men, are duplicating the Unicorn Tapestries from The Cloisters Museum in New York.  These tapestries, like room-size rugs but meant to be hung on the walls of a very large room, show Medieval men and women hunting a little white unicorn.  The final scene has the unicorn captured, lying down surrounded by a little white fence, against a background of hundreds of colorful flowers, with a few charming little rabbits here and there among the blossoms. 

I saw the Unicorn Tapestries on my first trip to New York, when I was 22 years old..  The Metropolitan Museum displays its Medieval collection at a separate museum called “The Cloisters”.  Monastery buildings, including several cloisters, were brought from Europe and reconstructed, stone by stone, on a wooded promontory on the northern tip of Manhattan.  Wandering through those quiet halls and gardens was like walking back into the Middle Ages.

I thought, “Nothing could display Medieval art better than this place.”

Then I went to Paris with David, and, a few blocks beyond the Pantheon, we found the Musee de Cluny, housed in a former monastery.  The old building, which for centuries housed monks of the order founded by St. Bernard of Cluny, is the perfect setting for art from the Middle Ages.

Surprise! Paris also has a set of unicorn tapestries. 

How did this happen?  Today’s young people do not realize that there was a World without color television or cell phones.  Before there was a printing press, people copied out books by hand.  Before there were photographs, hack artists copied portraits of royalty to send to other kings.  If a visiting king saw tapestries he liked in another castle, he would send to Brussels or some other place in Belgium, and order copies. 

That is, if he were rich.  While a painter could copy a portrait in a day, it took months to weave a tapestry.  They always cost fortunes.  Today peasants like me pay for a ticket to a museum and enjoy art once owned by royalty.

I bought a needlepoint kit for a tiny section from the Unicorn Tapestries.  I worked the wool through the canvas, creating two little brown bunnies surrounded by dainty flowers.  My very own bit of the Unicorn Tapestries, now framed, hangs in my bathroom beside the mirror where I brush my teeth.