Medieval writers agreed on one thing about the unicorn: no hunter could take it by force. It was too fast, too fierce, and its single horn was a weapon no armor could stop. The only way to catch it, according to the bestiaries, was to send a virgin into the forest. The unicorn would come to her, lay its head in her lap and fall asleep, and only then could the hunters close in. The Unicorn Defends Himself, one of the seven Unicorn Tapestries woven in the Southern Netherlands around 1495 to 1505, shows what happens when they try it the other way.
This is the panel where the legend's promise breaks. A creature meant to be tamed only by love refuses to be only prey. The hunters are winning, but the tapestry is on the unicorn's side, and the flowers and fruit of the peaceful millefleur world go on blooming around the violence as if nothing were happening.
The tapestries have always carried two readings at once. As a courtly story, the unicorn is the proud lover who resists until love finally tames him. As a Christian allegory, it is Christ, pursued, wounded and killed by the world, and this panel sits in the place of his struggle before the Passion. Medieval viewers didn't feel the need to choose. The horn itself had its own symbolic life: it was said to purify poisoned water, which made the unicorn an emblem of healing and of Christ cleansing the world of sin.
The real-world story of the horn is almost as strange. What princes bought as "unicorn horn" was narwhal tusk, sold at staggering prices as a charm against poison. Guests at royal tables had their food tested with pieces of it. The trade was so lucrative that when a Danish scholar, Ole Worm, showed in the 1630s that these horns came from a whale, merchants had every reason to hope no one listened.
Look for the letters A and E joined by a knotted cord, woven into several panels of the series. They are almost certainly the initials of the patrons who commissioned the set, possibly for a marriage, but despite a century of research no one has proven whose they were. After passing through the La Rochefoucauld family and surviving the French Revolution, the tapestries were bought by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and given to the Metropolitan Museum. They now hang together at The Cloisters in northern Manhattan.
What makes this panel memorable is its sympathy. It is the moment a hunted thing refuses to be only prey, and it feels as modern as any image of cornered courage made since.
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