The Lady and the Unicorn: Musee Cluny treasures, Art Gallery of NSW
French national treasures The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries are here at last to allow Aussies to take in their mysteries.
So much mystery lies in the art of the late medieval world, all but lost to 21st-century eyes. As the Middle Ages were waning, their visual arts reached an apogee that was already seguing into the early Renaissance. Where we see the “pretty” of mille fleurs tapestries, for example, lie unseen worlds. Where we see “decoration” lie deep theological triggers for a time drenched in religion.
The turn from medieval to early Renaissance is sometimes marked by a conveniently neat date: 1400. In the following century, fuelled by massive profits, Italian bank owners underwrote the leap from static, orthodox iconography to human warmth and agility. The body returned, in paint as well as stone, to its earlier freedom of classical Greek sculpture.
The church, too, the most aggressive profiteer of all, demanded ever more shock and awe as it launched the Counter-Reformation. Painters became celebrities and began to earn serious money as the best of them climbed from the status of guildsman to that of artistic genius.
Goggling at the price old-master paintings fetch today, we forget that tapestries were the most expensive artefacts a rich man could brag about in those days.
That most beautiful series in the mille fleurs tradition, now known as The Lady and the Unicorn and held in the Musee de Cluny right next to the Sorbonne on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris, is dated imprecisely to the last 15-odd years of the 1400s. Classed as “national treasures” by the French, the tapestries have, surprisingly perhaps, made their way to Sydney, where they go on show today at the Art Gallery of NSW, where they will remain on display until June 24. They last left home in 2013, for a six-month sojourn at Tokyo’s National Art Centre.
I recall the first time I saw them as a very young woman. On my first visit to Paris, and my first to the Musee de Cluny, I entered a round, darkened room and stood transfixed for who knows how long. The Lady with the Unicorn — as La Dame a la licorne was then translated and still was in my 1993 Cluny catalogue — was so lovely. And it was intensely moving, somehow, beyond the prettiness. The minutiae — in a style I soon learned was called mille fleurs, or a thousand flowers — drew me close in to inspect every metre of each piece. I returned to view them the next day, and have done so regularly since. It was the dawn of my fascination with early modern Western Europe’s art and history. And over the years, as my understanding of the era deepened, I came to realise just how much more than eye candy those tapestries were.
They are replete with symbolism. The slender young woman of the title stands flanked by a lion and a unicorn on what seems to be a floating island in a horizonless 2-D world. That she is a virgin, with the intensity of theological and social meaning that held at the time, we can presume from the proximity of the white unicorn.
The unicorn, in medieval mythology, was a strange beast: a horse with the tail of a lion, the hoofs of a goat and a single, long, spiral horn growing from its forehead. The only similar spiral found in nature is that of a narwhal, though that isn’t a horn but an elongated incisor. The most fearful and fanciful imaginary figures in those days were never pure invention but rather an amalgam of characteristics found in nature.
The unicorn was a wild animal that could be tamed only by a virgin. In a less romantic cycle, the Unicorn Tapestries housed in New York’s Cloisters museum, the unicorn is chased by hunters. He eludes them until he is tamed by a passing virgin, and killed by the hunters as he docilely lays his head in her lap. In the final tapestry, he is seen alive, tethered in a small garden: an allegory, it is thought, of the resurrection or of marriage to the church, or both.
In the Cluny tapestries a more sensuous world is evoked until, in the last one, renunciation is again portrayed.
Each of the first five portrays a different sense — sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch — a common theme in the Middle Ages when even the most devout wrestled with their passions while seeking to be worthy of God’s grace.
For “sight”, the unicorn gazes at itself in the mirror. For “hearing”, the lady plays an organ as her maidservant pumps the bellows. In “taste”, she chooses a sweet from a platter while a monkey puts one in his mouth. In “touch”, she holds the spiral horn of the unicorn as well as one of the standards carrying her colours: the colours of the commissioning family. For “smell”, the lady weaves a garland of carnations, while the monkey presses one to his nose.
The little furry animals that inhabit the lady’s island — the faithful dog, the mischievous monkey, the fertile rabbits — inhabit the larger universe too.
So far so good. It is the final tapestry, the one most replete with symbolism, that art historians can’t agree on. Called A Mon Seul Desire, it depicts the lady standing in front of a majestic tent, the lion and the unicorn formally rampant again and holding the standards aloft, as she handles the sumptuous gold necklace she has worn in the other tapestries. Her maid stands by with an open jewellery box.
Is the lady removing or replacing the necklace? Is she forswearing such earthly finery as the necklace as she heads for marriage? Or is she taking the necklace, also used as a symbol of marriage in those times, from the jewellery box? Or could it be both: renouncing earthly pleasure for her marriage to God?
Certainly all the symbols of the Virgin Mother are there. That richly decorated tent is typical of Maesta, depictions of Christ’s mother seated in majesty, surrounded by the saints.
The most famous of them may be Duccio di Buoninsegna’s 1308 altarpiece originally installed in Siena’s Cathedral, now resting in the nearby cathedral museum. The continuing presence of the unicorn, symbolising virginity, however, sits oddly with the bunnies, signifying fecundity, still playing at her feet. Her whippet, a hunter, is now rather outranked by a small, pampered, long-haired puppy sitting on an embroidered cushion by the lady’s side.
Experts still argue about the provenance, as well as the meaning, of the Cluny tapestries. The consensus now seems to be that they were commissioned by one of the Le Viste clan whose arms appear in each tapestry, though accounts — now liberally peppered with details from Tracy Chevalier’s 2003 novel The Lady and the Unicorn, one assumes — veer from him being a powerful nobleman to a wealthy arriviste who invented his own escutcheon.
It wasn’t until the reign of Louis XV in the 18th century that the powerful demanded some privacy for themselves and smaller, warmer private apartments were invented. In the 15th century, castles were still a series of huge stone halls, dauntingly cold and damp in winter, where kings did everything in public: holding court, eating, washing, being born and dying.
Louis’s great-grandfather — Louis XIV, the Sun King, whom he succeeded at the tender age of five — still held the grande levee every morning: noblemen filled his bedroom to watch him rise, shave, dress and eat breakfast, and to hope they might have a quick word in his ear before the day’s official business began.
In those physically and psychologically vast places, tapestries were essential. Made of wool and silk, and sometimes highlighted with metallic thread, they adorned the castles of princes and the palatial city apartments of bankers. They were, in fact, the most practical art objects a patron could own — serving to cover the stone walls and preserve heat — and a greater source of prestige than mere paintings. They were portable, so they could be carried from castle to castle across a prince’s domain.
And they were astonishingly expensive: it has been estimated that a weaver needed two months to weave a section 30cm square. And even the most journeymen weavers were expert: it could take a weaver a dozen years to earn his ticket, and the guild protected the rates of the qualified.
By the mid-15th century those powerful Italian families had agents in The Netherlands buying tapestries by the score and pumping the price up further. They began to offer master weavers jobs in Italy. In the 17th century, when Louis XIV established the famous Gobelins factory in Paris, the history of the art form had come full circle. Paris was an early centre of tapestry-making, but many weavers fled north to the relative freedom of The Netherlands during the religious wars of the Reformation.
The name of the then Flemish town Arras even became a synonym for a tapestry. The Oxford Dictionary defines an arras as “a wall hanging made of a rich tapestry fabric, typically used to conceal an alcove”. And we all know the shenanigans that went on behind the arras, from seduction to murder, in early theatre.
By the 15th century towns such as Brussels and Flanders in the then Southern Netherlands had become centres of weaving in Europe and The Lady and the Unicorn is presumed to have been made in Flanders.
As the 1500s progressed, the “pretty” medieval motifs gave way to the more turbulent imagery of the Renaissance: compare Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Annunciation (c. 1475), containing the same elegant topiary trees and carpets of flowers as in the tapestries, with the earthy musculature of Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ (1602-04). By the early 1500s, the famously rancorous rivalry between Leonardo and Raphael took a tapestry turn. Even as Michelangelo was labouring over his backbreaking work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, pope Leo X commissioned Raphael to design 16 tapestries to hang below it. They are only brought out for ceremonial occasions now, but the “cartoons” Raphael made are on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, on permanent loan from the Royal Collection for which Charles I bought them in 1623.
Like so many masterpieces we presume have always been famous, The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries were rediscovered only in the 19th century. They had been mouldering in the Chateau be Boussac in the Limousin region — about 50km from that other famous tapestry town, Aubusson — when they were spotted in 1841 by the French writer Prosper Merimee, whose day job for 30 years was inspector of French monuments.
He was exploring the castle with his friend George Sand, who lived nearby, when they stumbled on the tapestries. Both immediately realised their worth. Sand correctly dated them and they featured in her next novel, Jeanne. Merimee added them to the monuments register and the French state bought them in 1882. They were cleaned and soon went on display at the Musee de Cluny.
“All six feature a very beautiful woman ... always placed between a lion and a unicorn,” Merimee wrote to the French politician and art historian Ludovic Vitet. “There used to be several others at Boussac, finer ones, the mayor tells me, but the former owner of the chateau ... cut them up to cover carts and make rugs out of them.” The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, he added, “will share the same fate if we do not remove them from Boussac”.
The rest is art history.
The Lady and the Unicorn is on display at the Art Gallery of NSW from today until June 24.