What Makes The Unicorn Tapestries So Fascinating?

May 21, 2021 8:52 PM

Dive into all of the mysterious lore, debated symbolism, and enchanting aesthetics of the famous Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, currently displayed in the MET Cloisters
posted by bq (9 comments total)

It just destroys me but they no longer have the pay what you can policy.
I actually will have to save up money to go back to see them again.
posted by markbrendanawitzmissesus at 11:59 PM on May 21, 2021

This 2005 article in The New Yorker describes taking a digital photograph of the tapestries, an unexpected challenge for the museum.
posted by lasagnaboy at 12:05 AM on May 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

Unriht ærendspræc!
posted by fairmettle at 1:03 AM on May 22, 2021

So, that's clearly "A+E" and not "AE" everytime, right?
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 1:36 AM on May 22, 2021

Once I went with my father, who’s a medievalist, to the Cloisters museum. He mentioned that the likeliest explanation was that the AE was a shortening of the name of the person who was given the tapestries, probably the first and last letters of a given name.

Looking online, the likeliest candidate seems to be Antoine de la Rouchefoucauld, son of Francois de la Rouchefoucauld. That theory is laid out here (pdf, page 48) by Margaret B. Freeman, who was the curator of The Cloisters. This is written in the 70s, but I don’t know of any recent revelations that would discount it. The whole thing is worth reading.
posted by Kattullus at 2:24 AM on May 22, 2021 [8 favorites]

I dragged a group of high school friends over to the Cloisters during a trip to the city in 1974, luring them with the promise of seeing a “real” unicorn horn. We had all read a then-popular book about unicorns but it was before they became ubiquitous in kids’ stuff. The horn was there, all right—a narwahl tusk bound in gold at the ends, displayed in a corner of the room that held the tapestries.

All were impressed by the violence depicted in the tapestries themselves and their mysterious origins, but a few wandered off—only to rush back in to excitedly whisper that “John Boy” Richard Thomas was in the next room, and “he really does have that thing on his face!”

Somewhere I read that the tapestries were once used to keep potatoes from freezing.

The Cloisters is well worth a visit for the medieval jewelry alone.
posted by kinnakeet at 5:22 AM on May 22, 2021 [7 favorites]

From the NYT Article: For his part, Oi-Cheong Lee felt his sense of time dissolve. “The time we spent with the tapestries was nothing—only a moment in the life of the tapestries,” he said.

Thanks so much for this - great articles, both!
posted by Dressed to Kill at 6:55 AM on May 22, 2021

Sorry ^^ From the New Yorker article
posted by Dressed to Kill at 7:22 AM on May 22, 2021

Thanks so much for posting this analysis of the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters. I've wanted to see the unicorn tapestries (both this set, Hunt of the Unicorn, and La dame à la licorne in Paris) since I was about 9 or 10. I visited the ones in Paris about a decade ago, on my first visit to the city. I think I might have been looking forward to seeing them more than any particular work in the Louvre. Unfortunately, I've still not made it uptown to Washington Heights, but the next time....

I didn't realize it at the time, but my first introduction to these works (even before I started devouring everything I could find about unicorn folklore in the school library) was the opening to the animated adaptation of The Last Unicorn.
posted by invokeuse at 12:13 AM on May 24, 2021 [1 favorite]