Unicorn Crossing

June 12, 2026

Unicorn Crossing

Home to the hypnotic Lady and the Unicorn tapestries,

the Musée National du Moyen Âge, Paris’s Cluny Museum, currently presents an exhibit on unicorns. Indulging our inner mystic, seer, and innocent, we can let ourselves be carried away by the millenia of the creature's mystery and fascination. The following is a mere smattering of what the show has to offer.

To put us in the spirit, the small park at the back has a Unicorn Crossing sign and another pleading with us not to feed them. Gd knows what tourists might try to pass of as unicorn fodder.

I admit, I did have a dashed hope to see the Unicorn Hunt tapestries from the Cloisters.

(A friend, docent at the New York museum in the 90s, recalled how she began to explain to an elementary school group the anti-poison properties that the unicorn horn was thought to possess and a hand shot up in the class. When she called on him, he rolled his eyes to the back of his head and impatient said, « that’s not all you know » « Oh ? What else then ? » « they use their manes for pillows and their meat for dogs »....out of the mouths of babes)

But I was soon to be disabused of any disappointment. In this treasure trove, I learned of the double horned Lin or Qilin (or Kirin) whose feet never harm anything living, even grass. It appears at watershed moments in Chinese history: one was spotted by Confucius’s pregnant mother, and the captured creature was brought before the philosopher who wept at its wounds, and understood it as a sign of his own approaching death.

Particularly fascinating was a sort of idol (? perhaps) from tenth-eleventh century Luristan (present day Iran) presenting two ibexes face to face, but could be percieved as a head on filigree image of a double-horned unicorn.

Idol (Used name), -1150. Bronze. Cernuschi Museum, Museum of Asian Arts of the City of Paris.

Damsels having enthralled a unicorn abound, such as the Hans Daucher from Augsburg’s Fugger chapel, Bode-Museum 1513-1517

For lack of Raphael’s Lady holding a Unicorn

c. 1505-1506 Galleria Borghese, Rome

a Venetian oil consoled me, once attributed to Giorgione, from about 1510.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Another Venetian oil of Orpheus, after Titian, shows the poet’s song as it enthralls the vegetable and animal kingdoms alike, a unicorn in the rapt audience, much like myself wandering through these concrete traces and revelations of the imaginary.

Orpheus Enchanting the Animals, Apsley House, England

If you prefer your unicorns less tame, a tapestried polka dotted unicorn with a wild man from Upper Rhine 15-16th C

Armory also had its moment, with this 17th C chanfron to strike fear in the heart of the foe,

armure dite "de Sully," 1630s Musée de l'Armée, Paris

and on a sword of the same period, with pommel and guard blessed by the beast’s presence.

Netherlands, 1650s

I felt soon overcome by this heard of singlehorned beasts and the museum apothecary offered me remedies in three possible powders: Fossilized Unicorn, True Unicorn and Noble Unicorn.