"The Lady and the Unicorn" and the Symbolism of a Medieval Treasure

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The text below is the excerpt of the book The Lady and The Unicorn (ISBN: 9781783108145), written by Sutherland Lyall, published by Parkstone International.

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One of the most enduring and intriguing themes in mediaeval art is that of The Lady and the Unicorn. It is a subject riddled with complexity, contradiction and inconsistency. She is the Lady of many aspects: a woman among women, and yet an ideal. The unicorn – that fabulous beast of legend – has attributes of virtue, godhead and universal being. Together they combine both profane and spiritual implications.

Images of the Lady and the Unicorn are to be found in mediaeval art and design in and on an astonishing range of materials, from German ivory jewel-boxes to marginal illustration in English illuminated manuscripts, and from small Netherlandish engra vings to great French tapestries. In fact, one of the most important series of mediaeval tapestries to survive to this day tells a narrative, The Hunting of the Unicorn, and now hangs at The Cloisters branch of the Metropolitan Museum, New York. But an even more fascinating series of tapestries dates from almost exactly the same period – around the beginning of the 1500s – is called The Lady and the Unicorn, and hangs in six panels at the Musée de Cluny, Paris.

Touch, 1484-1500, The Lady and the Unicorn — *Touch*, 1484-1500. Tapestry from the series The Lady and the Unicorn. Wool and silk thread, 369 x 358 cm. Musée de Cluny, Paris.

Academic controvery continues to rage over the precise meaning, message or symbolism conveyed in both these series of tapestries. The two of them nonetheless together serve to focus our minds on the strangely enduring theme of the Universal Woman and the Universal Mythical Beast, their relationship to each other, and what its portrayal in art might fundamentally signify.

Apart from its heraldic function, the Unicorn is symbolic of such virtues as purity and chastity. In some manifestations it represents Christ; in others the eternal Lover. The Lady, meanwhile, is both serene and passive. In some cases hers is the serenity of the Virgin Mary, and often those illustrations of the Lady and the Unicorn together represent allegories of the relationship between Christ’s mother and her Son or of Christ’s Passion. But simply as a virgin, the Lady has the power to tame the savage beast, to lull it into a sense of security in which it may be captured by the huntsmen – and then, quite possibly, slaughtered. In which case the Lady is both pure and duplicitous, passive but powerful. At the same time the Unicorn may be Christ and the Lover, bewitched by the Lady, his heart captured and even pierced by Love with his hunter’s bow and arrow.

Wild Woman With Unicorn. Tapestry, about 1500, The Lady and the Unicorn — *Wild Woman With Unicorn*. Tapestry, about 1500. Historisches Museum, Basel.

In exploring the story and the meanings of great themes in our cultural heritage, we learn something about ourselves as well as about the eternally fascinating collective mind-set of the past. But it is of the past: we must be very careful not to apply to it the mind-set of the present. The mediaeval world was not only physically different from our own but in many ways it also perceived and thought about things quite differently from the way we do today. Moreover, knowledge of the past is necessarily sketchy. The sources of much of the historical evidence that remains themselves profoundly affect our interpretation of the period. A great deal of it is monastic or clerical in origin.

Happily for us, just enough raw information from the ordinary, everyday, secular world has survived to assure us that the mediaeval world was not entirely centred on the cloister or on laborious scholastic interpretations of obscure theological points. People ate, slept, made love, fought wars, hated, died – but all according to the standards of their own contemporary culture and environment.