The Unicorn Tapestries

Seven hangings woven in the southern Netherlands around 1500, of which one survives only as two narrow fragments. They were given to the Metropolitan Museum by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1937 and 1938 and they are the reason the Cloisters looks the way it does.

They are also a set whose titles have changed. The Met now calls the last one The Unicorn Rests in a Garden; the world calls it The Unicorn in Captivity. Six of the seven are catalogued under names different from the ones in most books. Anyone citing a plate has to say which accession number they mean.

Seven hangings, eight accession numbers

The set is usually described as seven tapestries. The Metropolitan Museum holds them under eight accession numbers, because the seventh subject survives only as two separated fragments.

The six complete hangings are 37.80.1 through 37.80.6, all of them a gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1937. The two fragments are 38.51.1 and 38.51.2, given the following year. All eight are in Gallery 17 at the Met Cloisters and all eight carry the same medium line: wool warp with wool, silk, silver and gilt wefts.

They are close to a uniform height. Every complete hanging is 145 inches tall, 368.3 centimetres, within a centimetre or two. The widths vary a great deal: from 251.5 centimetres for the last one to 426.7 for the third. The last hanging is both the narrowest and, on the Met's reading, possibly not part of the same series at all.

The Met has renamed them, and the old titles are still everywhere

Anyone working from published literature on these tapestries is working from a naming system the museum no longer uses, and the mismatch is a live cause of citation error.

The current Met titles are: The Hunters Enter the Woods (37.80.1); The Unicorn Purifies Water (37.80.2); The Unicorn Crosses a Stream (37.80.3); The Unicorn Defends Himself (37.80.4); The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden (38.51.1 and 38.51.2); The Hunters Return to the Castle (37.80.5); and The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (37.80.6).

The names used in most of the twentieth-century literature and in almost every reproduction are different: The Start of the Hunt, The Unicorn is Found, The Unicorn is Attacked, The Unicorn Defends Itself, The Mystic Capture of the Unicorn, The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle, and The Unicorn in Captivity. The last of those is the most reproduced image in the set and the museum no longer calls it that.

Two of the changes are more than cosmetic. The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle became The Hunters Return to the Castle, which drops the killing from the title of a hanging that shows it. The Mystic Capture became The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden, which drops the theological reading. Titles are arguments, and these titles changed because the argument did.

The Wikimedia Commons files still carry the old names, so a plate captioned The Unicorn is Attacked is in fact 37.80.3, The Unicorn Crosses a Stream. Every plate in the gallery below names the accession number as well as the title, because the title alone no longer identifies the object.

What they are made of

The warp is wool. The wefts are wool, silk, silver and gilt. Silver and gilt wefts are metal wound on a silk core, and they are the reason a set like this was a statement of wealth rather than a wall covering: the raw material was literally precious metal, and tapestries were burned for their metal content when they had ceased to be fashionable.

That is the first thing to understand about the survival of these seven. Late Gothic tapestry sets of this quality were destroyed at a rate that makes an intact narrative set exceptional, and the usual cause was not neglect but the deliberate recovery of the silver.

The Met's culture line records a division of labour that the popular account collapses. The cartoons are given as French, the weaving as South Netherlandish. Two countries, two trades, and no name attached to either.

The AE cipher

A cipher of the letters A and E, tied together with a knotted cord, appears on every hanging in the set, five times over on The Hunters Enter the Woods alone. It is the single strongest clue to who commissioned them and it has never been resolved. The Met's formula is exact and worth quoting for what it concedes: the cipher alludes to their original owners, who remain unknown.

Its presence on all seven is what holds the group together as a group. Its meaning is what the literature has argued about for a century, and the proposals have been made and withdrawn in print more than once. No identification currently commands agreement, and the museum does not endorse one.

One hanging carries a written prayer

On The Unicorn Defends Himself, 37.80.4, a hunter at the lower left blows a horn and wears a scabbard inscribed AVE REGINA C[OELI]: Hail, Queen of Heaven.

It is a Marian antiphon on the belt of a man helping to kill an animal. Whatever the hunt is about at the level of story, the object is not shy about carrying religious language into the middle of it, and any reading of the set has to account for a prayer to the Virgin embroidered on a hunter's equipment.

The last hanging may not belong to the hunt

The Met's own catalogue entry for The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, 37.80.6, says that it may have been created as a single image rather than as part of a series.

The internal evidence supports it. The unicorn is tethered to a pomegranate tree inside a low round fence, wearing a collar and a chain, and the red marks on his flank do not correspond to any wound: the Met reads them as juice from the bursting pomegranates above him. The tree is a medieval emblem of fertility and marriage, and the plants around him, wild orchid, bistort, thistle, were held to aid conception in both men and women. The frog among the violets at the lower right was cited by medieval writers for its noisy mating.

Read that way, the picture is not the end of a hunt. It is a marriage image, and the unicorn is a bridegroom in a fence low enough to jump.

The animal has a textual history older than the tapestries

The Met dates the unicorn's literary life from the Greek physician Ctesias in the fourth century BC, and describes the animal as known in the Middle Ages for two things: its supposed invincibility and the therapeutic property of its horn.

The second belief is the commercially significant one. Powdered horn was sold as an antidote to poison, and the horns sold as unicorn were narwhal tusks. A hunt cycle about capturing a unicorn was made for people who believed the animal existed and that its horn had a market price.

The chain begins in 1680, in a house in Paris

The first documentary trace of these tapestries is not a commission, an inventory of a workshop or a payment. It is a set of hangings on a wall in Paris, roughly one hundred and eighty years after they were woven.

The Met puts it precisely: they are first documented in 1680, when they hung in the Paris home of Francois VI de La Rochefoucauld. That is the author of the Maximes, one of the most quoted writers in French, and the first securely recorded owner of the most famous tapestries in America.

Everything before 1680 is blank. The museum states it without hedging: no documentation sheds light on the early history of the tapestries, including either their commission or their sequence of hanging. Nearly two centuries of the object's life are not merely undocumented in this record; they are undocumented anywhere.

Verteuil, and five of them in a bedroom

By 1728 the set had moved from Paris to the family's chateau at Verteuil in western France, and the Met records a detail that says more about how such objects were actually treated than any amount of iconography: five of them decorated a bedroom.

Not a state hall. A bedroom. The most celebrated Gothic tapestries in existence spent the eighteenth century as furnishing in a country house, which is precisely how they survived. Objects that stay in use in a private family stay out of the market, out of fashion cycles, and out of the hands of people who burn tapestries for their silver.

Looted in the Revolution, recovered in the 1850s

The Met's account of the Revolution is short and it is careful, and this record does not go beyond it. The tapestries were looted during the French Revolution. They were recovered in the 1850s. By 1856 they had been restored and rehung in the chateau's salon.

That is the documented shape of the episode: a loss, a gap of roughly sixty years, a recovery, and a restoration. Around it has grown a body of family tradition about what happened in the missing decades, most commonly that peasants used the hangings in a barn, to cover vegetables or to protect fruit trees from frost. Those stories are repeated everywhere and they are not in the museum's account of the object.

This record therefore states the loss and the recovery, and declines to state the barn. A tapestry that spent sixty years as agricultural sacking would be a remarkable fact about its condition, and a record that asserts it without a citation is asserting the most interesting thing it says on no evidence at all.

How they reached New York

The set was bought by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in two instalments: the six complete hangings in 1937, the two fragments in 1938. The credit line on all eight reads Gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr.

They are the anchor of the Cloisters, which opened in 1938, and they have been in the same gallery since. The price Rockefeller paid, the year he paid it and the member of the La Rochefoucauld family who sold are not stated on the Met's object records, and no figure appears in this record until one is cited.

The museum is not certain this is one set

The seven hangings are catalogued together, hung together and reproduced together, and the Met itself questions whether they belong together.

Its wording is that striking differences in dimension and composition have prompted scholars to question whether the hangings constitute one set or are, in fact, from multiple sets. The differences are on the record above: a constant height of 368.3 centimetres against widths running from 251.5 to 426.7, and one hanging, The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, that the museum separately says may have been created as a single image.

The AE cipher is the counter-argument, because it appears on every one of them, five times over on The Hunters Enter the Woods alone. But the Met says the cipher alludes to their original owners, who remain unknown, so what it proves is common ownership at some point, not a single commission.

The plants, and a number the museum gives twice

The tapestries are famous for a flora that can be identified to species, and the Met's object page gives the count: of the 101 species of plants represented, 85 have been identified. Named examples on The Hunters Enter the Woods include the cherry tree behind the hunters and the date palm in front of the sniffing hound, and the museum grows some of the others, such as lady's mantle and butcher's broom, in the gardens at the Cloisters.

The audio guide on the same page gives the figure differently: 101 species, of which over 85 per cent have been identified. Eighty-five of a hundred and one is 84.2 per cent, so the two statements on one museum page do not agree, and the audio version is the one that rounds in the museum's favour. It is a small thing and it is exactly the kind of small thing that gets copied.

The dyes are better settled. The Met states that chemical analysis has confirmed three vegetal dyes behind the whole palette: weld, madder and woad, giving yellow, red and blue, combined by the weavers to make everything else. All three grow in the Bonnefont Cloister garden downstairs from the tapestries.