The Hunt of the Unicorn

The Hunt of the Unicorn, or the Unicorn Tapestries, is a series of seven tapestries dating from between 1495 and 1505, now in The Cloisters in New York, probably woven in Brussels or Liège. The tapestries show a group of noblemen and hunters in pursuit of a unicorn. The Hunt for the Unicorn was a common theme in late medieval and renaissance works of art and literature. The tapestries were woven in wool, metallic threads, and silk. The vibrant colours, still evident today, were produced from dye plants: weld (yellow), madder (red), and woad (blue). One of the panels, The Mystic Capture of the Unicorn, only survives in two fragments.

The tapestries are subject to scholarly debate about the iconography, the artists who designed the tapestries, and questions surrounding the sequence in which they were meant to be hung. Possibly the seven tapestries were not originally hung together.

It was posited by James J. Rorimer in 1942 that they were commissioned by Anne of Brittany, to celebrate her marriage to Louis XII, King of France on 6 December 1491. The clue derived from the occurrence of A and reversed E tied with a cord in a bowknot throughout the series of tapestries. As Rorimer surmised, the letters A and E are interpreted as the first and the last letters of Anne's name, citied the elisions in the medieval age.

However Margaret B. Freeman refutes this fairly convincingly in her monograph of 1976, a conclusion which is supported by Adolph S. Cavallo in his 1998 work.

The tapestries show pagan and Christian symbolism. The pagan themes emphasise the medieval lore of beguiled lovers, whereas Christian writings interpret the unicorn and its death as the Passion of Christ. The unicorn has long been identified as a symbol of Christ by Christian writers, allowing the traditionally pagan symbolism of the unicorn to become acceptable within religious doctrine. The original pagan myths about The Hunt of the Unicorn refer to an animal with a single horn that can only be tamed by a virgin; Christian scholars translated this into an allegory for Christ's relationship with the Virgin Mary.

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