For most of the Middle Ages, the unicorn was not a fantasy. It appeared in natural histories beside the lion and the elephant, and its horn, sold as "alicorn," was one of the most expensive substances in Europe. Ground into powder or carved into cups, it was believed to detect and neutralize poison. Princes kept whole horns in their treasuries, and one owned by Elizabeth I was said to be worth as much as a castle. They were really narwhal tusks, brought south by Norse traders who had every reason to keep quiet about where they came from.
That background matters for The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, the last and most famous of the seven Unicorn Tapestries woven in the Southern Netherlands around 1495 to 1505. The other panels tell the hunt: the gathering, the pursuit, the wounding, the kill. Then this panel appears, and the unicorn is alive again, collared and chained to a pomegranate tree.
The red stains on its white coat look like wounds, but look up. They fall from pomegranates bursting with seeds overhead, which makes them juice, not blood. The pomegranate was an old symbol of fertility and, in Christian art, of resurrection and the Church, which gives the panel its two classic readings. As an image of marriage, it shows the lover happily captured and chained by love. As a religious allegory, it shows Christ risen after the Passion told in the hunt. Many historians think the tapestries were designed to hold both meanings at once.
The quietest detail may be the most important. The fence is barely knee-high. The unicorn could step over it whenever it liked. The chain is loose. Whatever keeps it here, it isn't force. For a set of tapestries possibly made to celebrate a wedding, that's a tender idea of what commitment is supposed to feel like.
The ground beneath it is a botanist's dream. Scholars have identified dozens of real plants in the millefleur background, among them wild orchids, bistort, thistle, and the wild strawberry, many associated with fertility, love or healing in medieval herbals. The initials A and E, tied together with a knotted cord, appear throughout the series, and no one has conclusively identified the couple they belonged to.
The tapestries themselves survived a close call. They were owned for centuries by the La Rochefoucauld family, looted from their château during the French Revolution, and according to family accounts ended up in local barns, reportedly draped over vegetables to protect them from frost. They were recovered in the 1850s, bought by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1922, and given to the Metropolitan Museum, where they hang at The Cloisters. A creature that returns from death to sit contentedly in a garden turned out to be the perfect emblem for objects that very nearly vanished.
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