Unicorns!

Eight years after Magical Unicorns, one might be surprised by the Musée de Cluny’s decision to devote a new thematic exhibition to the subject. Yet such surprise would be misplaced, since the exhibition’s focus, initially centred on the famous Lady and the Unicorn tapestry series (ill. 1) — on the years around 1500 when it was created and on its subsequent history following its rediscovery around 1840 and its acquisition by the museum in 1882 — has been broadened to encompass a period extending from Antiquity to the present day and a geographical area including non-European civilisations. We shall not return here to those civilisations gathered in an introductory section — which reveals one of the oldest surviving depictions of a unicorn, a ceramic seal from the Indus Valley civilisation in present-day Pakistan, dating from around 2000 BCE —, nor to the contemporary corpus displayed upstairs, which falls outside the scope of La Tribune de l’Art.

Designed by the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, which presented the initial version of the exhibition from October until last February, the exhibition was, as is traditionally the case at the German museum, preceded by an international symposium held there in June 2024. This helps explain the discrepancy between the very substantial catalogue accompanying the Paris presentation and the much more concise exhibition route itself, constrained, it must be said, by the limited space of the frigidarium…