Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Masters of the Unicorn Tapestries
French, Netherlandish; 15th-century, 16th-century
New York, NY: The Met Cloisters
88%
The Unicorn Crosses a Stream (from The Unicorn Tapestries). 1495-1505. Wool warp with wool, silk, silver, and gilt wefts
There's a tree at dead center (it's also up against the picture plane) bisecting the composition (it also throws what's behind it into illusionistic depth). It's one of the many firm straight objects that populate this scene. Spears, horn, plant-stalks, even the limbs of hunting dogs ready to pounce. All of these things in motion seem suspended. Yet the image in toto is diffuse, unbridled — an opposite of the stiff action, stiff objects it contains. This diffuseness is mostly a result of th e profusion of foliage all across the weaving, but then, in turn, to this profusion a stiffness returns: those clusters of plants are planes of tight fractal pattern blooming into depthless space. Every one of them is a pure surface, interlocked. But to each discrete flower or leaf these surfaces comprise, there then comes a roundness and a subtlety of rendering. Ad infinitum. This artwork is in constant opposition to itself: at once and everywhere, it's supple and stilted, flat and dimensional, static and in frantic movement. Its deep structure is hypostatized by the arrangement: that bisecting tree — why the hell did the artists decide to cleave their composition? — is a simultaneous token of the scene's spatial complexity and of its refusal to elide any visual information for the sake of illusion or unity. This is either modernism emerging from the ooze, or an older art going to sleep. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: The Met Cloisters
84%
The Unicorn Purifies Water (from The Unicorn Tapestries). 1495-1505. Wool warp with wool, silk, silver, and gilt wefts
More orderly than some of the other tapestries in this series and therefore less surprising in the ways it generates the illusion of depth out of an intractable flatness, this piece is nevertheless a marvel. It's divided roughly into five stacked sections, and it impresses the most when those sections meet. Look at the parabolic line where the band of hunters becomes the cordon of bushes below: there's not much modeling or perspective to distinguish one plane in space from the other, but the thicket of verdant linework giving way to a geometry of interlocking ochers, golds, and maroons nevertheless suggests depth and recession. In every inch of this tapestry, the schematic reductions of medieval art coexist (though contentiously) with something like a modern sense for pictures and their problems. Therein lies its aesthetic value. (Note: Unicorn Purifies is nearly a diptych with the slightly better The Unicorn Crosses a Stream: the outward-pointing spears of the hunters and the downturned horn of the horse in the former weaving become inverted in the latter, whose composition turns inward and upward at the same time as it bursts into action.) (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: The Met Cloisters
72%
The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from The Unicorn Tapestries). 1495-1505. Wool warp with wool, silk, silver, and gilt wefts
This is the most famous of the Unicorn Tapestries not because it has more aesthetic merit than the others, but because of its easy immediacy and how well it reproduces. Still, there are things about it that cut through the kitschification it's endured. While the dense, planar pattern of flowers is better utilized in all six of the other tapestries (where it works as accent within the composition, instead of comprising the image's whole field, as it does here), there is something undeniable about the effect of the tersely rendered flowers articulating themselves against that unflagging dark green ground. Plus, there are moments where the millefleur goes beyond decoration and becomes, productively, pictorial (the weeds growing in front of the beast's cage; the caul of dead space around the leaves of the fruit tree). If this artwork is predominantly just made of charm, it has such a surfeit of it that it edges its way (but barely) into artistic credibility. (TFS, 2025)