LMLT Newsletter — April 2022 — Textile Trivia/Further Reading

Textile Trivia
Medieval Unicorn Tapestries

Did you know that April 9th is National Unicorn Day?
Probably not—very few people do. That's okay, though. We're here to remedy that.

First, a few things about tapestries.

Generally speaking, in a secular context, tapestries in the medieval Europe were a textile commissioned by the nobility, and they were many things at once.
Naturally, they were propogandistic, relating and setting down the events of history the way the commissioner would have preferred them to be remembered. They were also a practical solution for insulating cold, damp castle walls.
(Remember when Hamlet murders Polonious, who was hiding being a tapestry, spying for Gertrude? Elsinore was probably super cold and, we imagine, had tons of these hanging from the walls. A convenient—if dangerous—hiding place!)

For those of you who've taken a tour of our Bird in the Textile Arts exhibit, you'll remember this tapestry seen left—an exceptional example of the art, neither medieval nor European.

And of course, tapestries were works of extraordinary beauty, not to mention expense. They demanded a huge amount of cooperative effort to produce, effectively adding to their exclusivity. The more tapestries you had, the more wealth you were showing off.

Most medieval tapestries were produced in France and what is now the Netherlands/Belgium region.
There was a certain division of labor involved: the designer of the cartoon, or the full-scale, full-color pattern from which the image was reproduced on the loom, was a different artist from the weavers themselves.
This cartoon would have been passed on to the weaver, who would hang it behind their high-warp loom; or, if they were using a low-warp loom, they would cut the image into strips and place them under the warp threads. (On a low-warp loom, the image would need to be backward, since they're working from the back of the tapestry.)
Tapestry-weaving were not only notoriously labor-intensive, they were a time-consuming enterprise. If one square yard of coarse tapestry could take a month to produce, imagine how long it would take to churn out a square yard of the fine, detailed stuff like the Unicorn tapestries!

Unicorn tapestries, though...

When someone mentions a famous medieval unicorn tapestry, they could be referring to one many! There are a few really iconic ones, and they're grouped into two "series." (The Lady and Unicorn are pretty clearly all made to go together, but if you examine the Hunt of the Unicorn series, you'll find there are some narrative and stylistic issues with lumping them together in sequence.) And—other than the Bayeux tapestry, which boasts an embroidered image, not a woven one—these unicorn tapestries are probably the most famous tapestries in the world.

There are two internationally renown series that prominently feature unicorns: one that lives at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art—The Hunt of the Unicorn series—and another that lives in France, at the Musée National du Moyen Age (also called the Cluny museum)—The Lady and the Unicorn series.
The seven unicorn tapestries at the Met can be found in the Met Cloisters, a smaller museum within the Met system that specializes in European medieval art and architecture.
The ones at the Cluny museum live in their own, specially constructed oval room, so you can walk in a circle while taking in the images in sequence.