Five years before giving life to the most famous gypsy woman in universal literature, Carmen, Prosper Mérimée worked as an inspector for the Historical Monuments Commission of France. One day in July 1841, the steps of the bureaucracy took him to the almost exact heart of the country: the Limousin region. The town of Boussac had just purchased the castle from the counts of Carbonnières, and Mérimée had to examine whether the building, before becoming the headquarters of any public office, held anything of value to the State.
After passing through the doors, a holocaust of “tapestries cut to cover the carts” appeared before his eyes, he wrote. However, there was a series of six (in good condition, “only one a little eaten by rats”) that were worthy of entering the king's collection. Mérimée had brought to light the Lady of the Unicorn tapestries, dated to the 15th century and considered one of the crowning works of this almost forgotten art.
The tapestries are today in an oval room expressly designed for them in the Parisian Musée de Cluny - Musée national du Moyen Age, where they are the star piece thanks, above all, to the popularity that the novel La Lady and the Unicorn, by the American Tracy Chevalier. But these tapestries were on the verge of being forgotten or destroyed.
Almost forty years passed between its discovery and its acquisition by the State. The Historical Monuments Commission did not pay much attention to Mérimée's praise. It took a campaign orchestrated, among others, by the writer George Sand (who included them in some of her novels), for them to achieve fame among the public. Such fame that the public treasury had no choice but to make the payment and buy the six pieces.
Tapestry was, from the 11th to the 19th century, an art only available to the most powerful. But its function was not only aesthetic, but also practical: it mitigated the cold that seeped through the stones and muffled the echo in the enormous halls.
The preparation required a large amount of time and labor. Especially if, as in the case of The Lady with the Unicorn, a mil-fleurs (thousand flowers) was chosen, a background with countless plant and animal elements that forced the weavers to make continuous color changes. Chevalier, during his research for the novel, concluded that the six pieces cost, at least, the equivalent of 250,000 dollars (at the beginning of this century, which would be about 385,000 euros today).
The making and buying and selling of a tapestry involved a large number of intermediaries and contracts. That is why it is so attractively mysterious that there is no documentary trace of The Lady with the Unicorn. When was the series manufactured? Who painted the cardboards? In which workshop were they woven? And most importantly: for whom?
Welcome to the world of hypotheses. Based on the ladies' clothing, experts date the pieces to the 15th century, the golden century of tapestry. The style of the drawings is French, most likely Parisian, with its dreamlike and stylized figures. As for its place of manufacture, there is consensus on placing it in the north of France or in Flanders: Touraine, Bruges or Brussels are some of the candidate locations, not to mention that at the time itinerant looms (which worked in the buyer's own rooms, and thus ensured that the tapestries fit perfectly on the walls).
Early observers of the tapestries in the 19th century referred to them as “Turkish.” The reason was obvious: the repetitive repetition of the crescent symbol throughout the entire series. The legend soon began to circulate that the work had arrived in France among the luggage of Zizim, the Turkish prince who in the 15th century settled in the Limousin region after losing the fight for the sultanate against his brother Bayecid.
At the end of the 19th century, this imaginative hypothesis had already exploded: the coat of arms that appears in The Lady with the Unicorn is that of the Le Viste family, a clan of lawyers and officials who, starting in 1464, held important positions in the Parisian courts of Louis XI and Charles VIII. Crescents appear on its insignia, an element that, despite the Muslim connotation, was not so strange on medieval Christian shields. In fact, without going any further, the banner that the troubadours attributed to Guinevere, the wife of the mythical King Arthur, included a crescent.
Historians agree in pointing to the Le Viste family as patrons of tapestries, an idea supported by the absence of gold or silver threads, which raised the price to astronomical levels and were typical of kings or nobles of very high status. However, there are no clear clues about which member of the clan carried out the order or the reasons he may have had for doing so.
The most famous hypothesis is that it is a wedding gift for a daughter of the family (the theory used by Tracy Chevalier in her novel). However, this interpretation encounters a small heraldic obstacle: the husband's insignia does not appear anywhere, and it is not very likely that he would simply accept to decorate the walls of her house with such a shameless self-homage from her father-in-law. .
A more prosaic interpretation suggests that the Le Vistes simply wanted a work that celebrated their glittering social rise, and hence the abundance of shields. In 1489 Jean Le Viste was appointed president of the Court d'Aids, one of the courts of justice of the court. Maybe he celebrated it with some tapestries.
Whatever the reason for the commission, historians seem to be clear that the tapestries are an allegory of the five senses. Without contradicting this idea, we must also take into account that for the 15th century viewer the series had an undoubted religious background. The unicorn, thanks to its mention in the Bible, had crossed the bridge between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, becoming a popular symbol of Christ.
This animal with a horn on its head, the body of a horse, a goat's beard and a lion's tail had been mentioned for the first time in the 5th century BC. C. by Ctesias, the physician of the Persian emperor Artaxerxes II. For the Greeks it was not exactly a mythological beast: they were completely sure that it lived in the distant lands of India. In Europe, until the 17th century, many believed not only in the existence of the unicorn, but also in the healing power of its horn as an antidote to poisons.
On the other hand, if one wants one can extract a thousand meanings from the elements that appear in the series. Armed with a dictionary of medieval symbols we can verify that the rabbit means fertility; the magpie, gossip; mint, purification; the daisy, resurrection... Experts, however, do not place emphasis on this symbolic path, which is very much in vogue today, but which can lead to overinterpretations. When searching for mysteries, historians settle for a much less allegorical one: that lady who changes (will they be different or does she only vary in expression and attire?) from tapestry to tapestry.
The series is called The Lady of the Unicorn, but the most appropriate thing would be to say “the ladies”: the protagonist changes her face from one tapestry to another. That is why most scholars conclude that we are facing a succession of allegories, and not the vignettes of a story. Another point of consensus is that these allegories refer to the five senses, although a problem arises here: the series has a sixth tapestry...
One of the unknowns about the tapestries is the order in which they were hung and how they were viewed. One theory (the one we have applied here) indicates that the series is defined by the number of times the Le Viste family crest is repeated in each allegory. The problem with this theory is that A mon seul désir, the sixth tapestry, only displays the family's weapons three times, the same as that of tact. Some specialists believe that this tapestry was the original allegory of this meaning and that is why it is larger than the rest: it was in the center of the series and created a symmetrical structure.
Another hypothesis relates the senses to the process of growth of the human soul, a common content in the philosophy of the time. The order would be: smell (childhood), taste (adolescence), A mon seul désir (maturity), sight (knowledge of scientific processes) and touch (this tapestry would symbolize complete mastery of the environment, hence all the animals look strap on the neck).
This text is part of an article published in number 473 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
