Summary: The Unicorn Tapestries In Metropolitan Gallery

As medieval historian William Tyler puts it: “Magnificent as decoration, tapestries reflected the taste and preference in the subject matter of the most wealthy and powerful elements in the land. In turn they influenced the ideas and values of those who lived among them and saw them day after day.” The Unicorn Tapestries in Metropolitan Museum in New York are finest artworks of late middle ages. With the liveliness of the figures, individualization of faces and the texture of costumes, and the refined fauna, it is considered one of the best among remaining tapestries from fifteenth to sixteenth centuries.

The tapestry made of wool, silk, silver and gilt wefts. The dimensions work out to around 86 feet, 7 ½ inches by 15 feet 9 inches, which refers to combined width of seven pieces and the height of each. I have chosen two tapestries in the series—The Unicorn in Captivity and The Start of the Hunt. The Unicorn in Captivity is 3.68 x 2.51meters.

New questions have arisen as to who these designers and weavers were who had such an intimate acquaintance with plants that they were able to reproduce details of leaf and flower with a perfection unparalleled in any other art form of the period . They even carefully placed the moisture-loving plants to the water’s edge, the correct forest trees together, and the plants of open spaces generally where they belonged in nature. They were evidently excellent ecologists.

The more one gazes at the original work in these superb tapestries, the more familiar flowers one discovers—and the more one marvels that a designer who could conceive the grandeur of the drama of the unicorn hunt for the weavers to reproduce could at the same time suggest the details of more than 100 kinds of flowers—most of which were reproduced with accuracy, even a feeling for form and