The Lady and the Unicorn (I)

The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, housed today in the Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris, haunt the imagination. Woven around 1500 for a marriage within the noble Le Viste family, the six hangings have long been understood to be an allegory of the five senses, within a nuptial context of Christian anthropology. Following the Aristotelian hierarchy of the most terrestrial to the most celestial, we ascend from touch to sight. In the first the lady rests a hand upon the unicorn’s horn symbolizing our capacity of knowing by means of skin contact. Then we move to taste in which she seems to take a bonbon from a salver. To evoke smell, she weaves a garland of flowers. In hearing we find her listening to a portable organ. Sight is the highest, most immaterial of the senses and thus no wonder that its image is perhaps the most memorable of all. The lady holds up a mirror for the beast in which he gazes at himself, an image static over the centuries of a fleeting reflection, an illusion made real.

This penultimate image is the densest in the series. It seems to me that its hold on the viewer comes from showing a showing, image within an image, a meta-representation that is nonetheless pictured by means of woven thread, an essentially haptic and tactile experience in which eye and fingertip seem to converge. This would be appropriate for a representation that would be the apogee of this trajectory from base touch to the heights of Vision, in the most inclusive understanding of that term.  Further to that there is included in this final of the five senses, so much that hearkens not only to the fleshless Sight but also to the flesh itself, that base of the hierarchy within its zenith. The Unicorn nestles in the woman's lap and she lays her graceful arm round his neck. Touch and Sight  coexist indeed coincide harmoniously. In fact, Aristotle himself did say that sight is touching from a distance.

This much aside, for a series of tapestries with the capacity to pull you into a state of dreamlike consciousness, the explanation, however exact, falls flat. It leaves us lacking a means to explain its power to enchant. The final tapestry reinfuses some of the mystery to the group.

In this culminating sixth hanging, the woman handles a necklace hovering over a jewelry box. Is she taking it from the store of jewels in celebration of her wedding or is she on the other hand returning it and renouncing the fleshly world (women were understood to be more subjugated to the bodily senses than men)? Further ambiguities confuse any clear analysis. On the tent we read “A Mon Seul Désir” which can be translated in many ways, such as “To My One Desire” “At My Own Will” or "I do this of my own volition." (And as with Sight, the image has used a meta-technique, for the embroidered  message is in fact embroidered upon the tapestry itself).

In this it recalls the mode for emblems that takes Europe at just this period (starting the with The Dream of Poliphilus printed in 1499, contemporaneous with the Lady and the Unicorn, and just a few decades later Andrea Alciata publishes the first volume of these creations in 1531 in Emblemata) . In the practice of the emblem a cryptic epigram or motto is paired with an equally enigmatic image. The one, the verbal, represents the soul or mind and the other, the pictural, the body. They are then at their heart a reflexion on the mind-body nexus. The tension thus established is then similar to the theme presented in the Lady and the Unicorn, between her senses and the “seul désir.” This would also explain the pull of the final of the sense tapestries, Sight, and why it is so effective, in itself capturing that balance of body (touch) and mind (sight).

In the French preface to Emblemata we can read “But here Emblems are nothing but what some paintings ingeniously invented by men of wit [have] represented, and similar to the Hieroglyphic letters of the Egyptians, that contained the Ancients’ secrets of wisdom within, by means of certain mottos and such as sacred portraits: of this teaching they did not permit that its mysteries be communicated except to those who were able...and not without good reason excluded the vulgar profane.” *

Looking at the tapestries in this light, to see them as a woven emblem permutated into a series of tapestries, reinfuses them with some of their power and mystery- containing an arcane wisdom for the ages that is nonetheless kept apart from the uninitiated.

Marriage was certainly seen as a rite of passage, a ritual of initiation into the knowledge of and by the body, in which the heart plays primary role. It was a sacrament, one of the seven established by the Church, paralleling that of ordination for the celibate.  We know too that the woman is understand to be a virgin by three strands of thought. Firstly she is the bride and as such in a late medieval aristocratic world, "untouched." Further to that, in this same world, in this same imaginary, only a virgin could attract a unicorn to herself and tame it. Finally, in the Christological symbolism of the unicorn, the lady stands for the Virgin of virgins, Mary. The near hymeneal (after the wealth of phallic horn imagery) representation of the tent functions as a kind of visual play on the marriage veil, and seals off the lady from the outer world.

Hence for this visual path towards the marriage bed, the tension of flesh/spirit, that of the five senses and then the soul/heart/Désir is powerfully pictured in an entrancing image that beckons us at once outward and inward in this journey toward knowing. It is a journey reserved for those whose eyes will travel the sacred trajectory of the tapestries by means of Vision yet never forgetting the tactile which will lead us there.




*« Mais icy, Emblemes ne sont autre chose que quelques peintures ingenieusement inventees par hommes d’esprit, representees, & semblables aux lettres Hieroglyphiques des Egyptiens, qui contenoient les secrets de la sagesse de ces anciens là par le moyen de certaines devises & comme pourtraits sacrez: de laquelle doctrine ils ne permettoient que les mysteres fussent communiquez sinon à ceux qui en estoient capables, & qui d’ailleurs estoient bien entendus: & non sans bonne raison en excluoient le vulgaire profane.»