The Lady and the Unicorn: Musee de Cluny works at Art Gallery of NSW
These six tapestries are magnificent, but we must take care not to over-interpret certain details.
The word “aesthetic” is used in a variety of ways, mostly connected to art and beauty, but we tend to forget that it primarily and etymologically refers to sense-perception. The original meaning of the Greek aisthanomai, to perceive, is closer to the surface in such derivatives as anaesthesia, the lack of sense-perception, or synaesthesia, the association of one kind of sense impression with another, typically colour with sound.
The word is associated with art because paintings, sculptures, music and so on are experienced through the senses before being interpreted by the imagination and reflected on by the intellect. Hence the value we attach to the refinement of the formal means of art, because it allows more subtle and complex nuances of meaning to be conveyed to the senses and through them to the mind.
Some cultures, such as the Japanese, take aesthetic refinement to the highest level, both in the practice of art and in many aspects of everyday life in all classes of society. Others are coarser, especially when, as so often, refinement has been confined to a small upper class and has not penetrated to any extent into the peasantry and working masses.
In contemporary Western consumer culture there is a certain tendency to obtuseness that can affect even people who believe they like art. The problem seems to be more than just a lack of sophistication; it is rather an alienation from the senses, which leads to an inability to perceive or respond to refined and complex sensory data. This is why not only commercial entertainment and the mass media but even much of what purports to be serious art is lacking in real aesthetic subtlety.
Ideas, ideology and good intentions are no substitutes for the irreducible imaginative meanings conceived and conveyed in art.
We can ponder what it must have been like centuries ago — long before the cacophony of images, slogans, clickbait headlines, opinionated and self-righteous tweets and other superficial stimuli that consume and exhaust our attention every day — to enter a cathedral, for example. Imagine the vast space when most other buildings were small; the perfume of incense instead of the acrid smells of the street; music and singing in place of the noise of crowds and animals and carts; and perhaps above all, the brilliant jewel-like colours of the stained-glass windows when the urban world outside, including most people’s clothing, was largely grey and brown.
We may in many other respects be grateful not to live in the Middle Ages, but there is no denying that the life of the senses must have been far more acute and varied and immediate than it has become. The medieval period reflected on the nature of the five senses too, for they played a central part in the scholastic theory of knowledge: they were not only sources of pleasure but had epistemological and, ultimately, theological significance as well.
It is from this world that there arose an extraordinary masterpiece of late medieval art that has rarely been shown outside Paris but which can now be admired in Sydney for the next few months. The six magnificent tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn, discovered only in 1841 in a country chateau, are thought to date from about 1500, a date that reminds us of the different historical chronologies in the north and south of Europe at the time.
In Italy, 1500 is the High Renaissance, a few years before Michelangelo would paint the Sistine ceiling and Raphael the Vatican Stanze. In France and the north, however, it was the end of the Middle Ages. Some elements of the new vision of the Italians had been tentatively assimilated by the late 14th century and incorporated into the style known as international gothic. The Renaissance style would not penetrate substantially into the north until the 16th century, by which time the Italian Renaissance was turning into what we now call mannerism.
These tapestries are still in the international gothic manner, which includes much incidental realism but emphasises grace and elegance of line above all. There is a concern for modelling and space in details of drapery and the position of some elements of furniture and other objects, and yet trees, clothes and fabrics tend to revert to opulent flat patterning.
Each scene is set on a kind of island of semi-perspectival space, but these islands float against a spatially neutral decorative background filled with flowers and animals.
The six tapestries are hung in a way that echoes their display at the Musee de Cluny in Paris, and the lighting is low for conservation reasons. As your eyes adjust to the relative dimness, a world of extraordinary visual opulence is revealed: not the aggressive but insubstantial noise of digital media, but a heavier, denser and more absorbing experience, with multiple layers of significance and visual pleasure.
The scenes are typical of the late medieval culture that Johan Huizinga evoked in his classic study The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919): the love of symbolism, and the mixture of familiar iconographic motifs with symbols that remain ambiguous or enigmatic. Some elements can be explained with confidence; with others we must remain speculative. And we should beware of over-interpreting certain details, such as the expression of the lion, which is less consistent than those of the woman or the unicorn, simply because the artist had never seen a lion and was working from heraldic models.
Each tapestry features a beautiful and aristocratic young woman, tall and slim, and her maid, as well as the two beasts that happen also to be on Britain’s royal coat of arms: the lion and the unicorn. The unicorn in particular plays an important role in relation to the lady, but it is not possible to ascribe a coherent symbolic meaning to the two beasts, or any kind of symmetrical opposition of significance. At most it seems that the unicorn could be associated with what was by this time already the very old idea of the courtly lover who is tamed by the lady and yet also the object of her desire.
The theme of love and desire — especially as it is explicitly evoked in the last tapestry in the cycle — helps to unify the depiction of the five senses. There is no set order in the iconography of the senses, but we might well start with smell, in which the lady is plaiting a garland of flowers, choosing from a salver of freshly picked ones held by her maid. Behind, a monkey, even in pre-Darwinian times a symbol or proxy for the human, smells one of the flowers.
If the perfume of a flower is associated with love, desire and the thought of absent lovers, music, evoked by the portable organ in the allegory of hearing, symbolises harmony and thus the restraint or sublimation of desire, as Shakespeare writes of wild horses, “their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze by the sweet power of music”.
The organ sits, incidentally, on an oriental rug: these often appear in Flemish art of the previous century, but here, as in the opulent fabrics of dresses and curtains, there is a curious aesthetic reflexivity in weaving that imitates weaving.
Taste is given particular prominence, with a tapestry bigger than those of the other four senses. The lady appears as a falconer, feeding the small but fierce bird of prey that perches docilely on her glove; the falcon is a symbol of the desire of the lover and thus here of the lady’s power to tame and control her knightly suitor.
Significantly, this is the scene in which the unicorn stands in the most excited and aroused posture, on his hind legs.
Of course with symbolic beasts, especially when explicitly depicted as heraldic supporters, it is important to remember that posture or attitude was codified and is even today known in the language of heraldry by archaic names that go back to this period. Thus the standing attitude of the unicorn in the sense of taste is known as rampant, or here perhaps more accurately salient; in most of the other scenes, where he sits on his haunches with forepaws raised, he is sejant erect or sejant rampant; significantly, the interpretation of music as symbolising the calming of desire is confirmed by the unicorn’s couchant attitude in that scene.
Finally, he is standing quietly on all fours, or statant, in the sense of touch, the image in which the lady’s desire is implied in the way that she gently holds the beast’s horn, a motif emphasised by the fact that here only she also holds the unicorn’s standard with her other hand. The phallic symbolism would not have been lost on the original audience: the medieval mind may have been preoccupied with sin, but it was not prudish in the later Victorian way. And yet this erotic touching does not occasion visible arousal in either the lady or the beast; it seems rather to subdue his wild nature.
The most famous tradition about unicorns was that they could never be captured by hunters, but would yield of their own accord to a virgin and lay their heads submissively in her lap. In this the unicorn also becomes a type of Christ, who allows himself to be born in human form to a virgin. Here, in the sense of sight, the traditional myth is given an original variation, for the beast kneels at her lap rather than lying in it, and gazes at his own reflection in a mirror that she holds up to him.
The mirror is a standard medieval symbol for prudence, one of the four cardinal virtues, together with justice, fortitude and temperance. Prudence is essentially wisdom, foresight and self-knowledge, hence the symbol of the mirror. And perhaps this is the culmination of a series of images that evoke the lady’s relation to a passionate but submissive lover, and almost the preparation that he must undergo before finally being admitted to union with her.
This seems indeed to be the meaning of the final scene, generally considered the most enigmatic of all, where the lady and the unicorn are shown before an open tent, covered in tongues of flame that symbolise passion and inscribed a mon seul desir — to my one desire. The maid holds a chest from which the lady takes a sumptuous necklace with which to adorn herself, while the unicorn’s hoof slips into an unmistakably vulval fold in the fabric of the tent.
A little dog has appeared as a new motif and sits prominently on a stool in the foreground, a symbol of fidelity in the union that is about to be consummated.
The Lady and the Unicorn.
Art Gallery of NSW. Until June 24.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout