EXPO: UNICORNS AT THE CLUNY MUSEUM

EXPO: UNICORNS AT THE CLUNY MUSEUM

A museum to literally lose your head over—you can ask the kings and saints who used to hang on the walls of Notre Dame many years ago. Recently, I went to the unicorn exhibition at the Cluny Museum of Medieval Art. It’s a very old institution, dating back to the 19th century, and it already had millions of visitors when it first opened back then.

I hadn't been until now, and this year it has become my favorite museum. I knew about The Lady and the Unicorn tapestry from art history, but I had never seen it in person. It’s breathtaking; the room isn't very large, and the tapestries look monumental. It feels like you could join right into that medieval picnic with ladies and animals, some fantastic and others not.

The unicorn exhibition is quite small, yet it’s one of the most inspiring I’ve ever seen. You discover things like: Unicorns actually appear in the Bible; despite being imaginary, medieval bestiaries included them right alongside real animals which, by the way, the illustrators of the time (illuminators) had never seen either, like lions or elephants; there used to be a market for selling real unicorn horns, but they didn't come from horses—they came from Narwhals, a fish known as the unicorn of the sea.