The Ancient Legends, Myths and Stories Behind the Lady and the Unicorn Tapestries at Musée de Cluny

As if there wasn’t already a good reason to visit Musée de Cluny, their latest exhibition features the six tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn (Tapisseries de la Dame à la licorne). I can’t wait to see it. My favorite period of history is the Middle Ages, and this museum specializes in this era. 

Long before it became a pop culture mascot, the unicorn was considered a real animal, a symbol of divine power, a cure for poison, and one of the most loaded images in medieval art. The exhibition “Unicorns!” opened on March 10, 2026, and runs through July 12. 

It brings together around a hundred works from some of the most important museums in the world, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Prado in Madrid, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Louvre. 

The exhibition is organized by the Musée de Cluny and Grand Palais-Rémi, in partnership with the Museum Barberini in Potsdam.

This History of the Unicorn

The unicorn wasn’t just a fairy tale creature invented for bedtime stories. For centuries, educated people across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia treated it as a real animal.

The ancient Greeks wrote about it as natural history. Ctesias, a Greek physician who had traveled to Persia, described a wild donkey with a single white horn in the 4th century BCE. Pliny the Elder mentioned it. Aelian wrote about it. It appeared in bestiaries, the illustrated animal encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, listed alongside lions and elephants.

It might be that during this time, the world was full of animals people had never seen. If travelers were coming back with reports of a single-horned beast from distant lands, why wouldn’t it exist?

Marco Polo himself claimed to have seen one. His description, though, is not exactly flattering. He wrote about a large, ugly beast, heavy on its feet, with mud on its head. He was almost certainly describing a rhinoceros. But the word unicorn is what made it into the records.

What the Horn Was Actually Worth

The horn of the unicorn, known as an alicorn, was believed to have extraordinary medicinal properties. It could purify poisoned water, neutralize toxins, and, when ground into a powder, cure diseases ranging from ulcers to fever to melancholy. Cups made from alicorn were given to kings as protective gifts. European courts paid fortunes for them.

The only problem was that narwhals are not unicorns.

The tusks being sold as alicorns across medieval Europe were, almost certainly, the teeth of narwhals, the Arctic whales whose single spiraled tusks can grow up to ten feet long. Viking and Norse traders were moving these into European markets at spectacular profit. They looked exactly like the horn people expected a unicorn to have. The spiral pattern matched the descriptions.

The Musée de Cluny exhibition features one of the most striking illustrations of this trade: the Danny Jewel, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, created around 1550 to contain a fragment believed to be a unicorn horn. 

It was designed to be held near food as a safeguard against poisoning. The fragment, of course, was a narwhal tusk. A 17th-century tankard at Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, made from an actual narwhal tusk decorated with silver unicorns, tells the same story.

It took until 1638 for the Danish physician Ole Worm to formally identify the alicorn trade for what it was. Powdered narwhal tusk was still being sold in Europe for medicinal purposes as late as 1741.

The Unicorn in Christian Symbolism

Beyond the medical trade, the unicorn carried deep religious meaning throughout the Middle Ages.

An ancient Greek text called the Physiologus, which served as an early model for later bestiaries, described the unicorn as a fierce creature that could only be subdued by a virgin. This image was quickly absorbed into Christian iconography. The unicorn became a symbol of Christ, wild and untameable until it rested willingly in the Virgin’s lap.

The exhibition includes a glass painting from the Musée de Cluny’s own collection showing a young woman accompanied by a unicorn, placed above a scene of the Virgin and Child. It’s a striking example of how medieval artists wove these symbolic threads together without contradiction.

At the same time, the unicorn represented the unhappy lover, betrayed by his mistress during the traditional hunt. The same animal could stand for Christ, for chivalric love, for purity, and for eroticism, depending entirely on context. What seems contradictory to a modern viewer apparently did not seem so at the time.

The Unicorn Shows Up Everywhere

The exhibition is structured across ten thematic sections and traces the unicorn across cultures and centuries. An engraved seal from the Indus Valley, dated to around 2000 BCE, shows a unicorn-like creature. 

A sculpted Qilin from the Han Dynasty in China, dated to around 206 to 220 CE, represents a related tradition. A 17th-century Turkish earthenware dish features a unicorn alongside a stag and a lion.

The creature traveled along trade routes, religious texts, and the imaginations of artists who had never left their own cities. It appeared on Torah crowns. It was described in a 15th-century account of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem by Canon Bernhard von Breydenbach of Mainz, who listed it among the exotic animals he encountered there.

Scotland made it the national animal. The Prado’s collection has examples from the Spanish tradition. The V&A contributed the Danny Jewel. The Rijksmuseum contributed a Venetian oil on canvas from around 1510 titled Woman and Unicorn, which shows a very different register: tender and intimate rather than fierce.

And Then There Are the Tapestries

The Musée de Cluny’s collection includes one of the most celebrated artworks in the world: La Dame à la Licorne, the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries.

There are six of them, and they were made around the year 1500. They were probably designed in Paris, though they were almost certainly woven in workshops in Flanders, where the standard of weaving was higher. Each one is roughly 3.5 meters tall.

They ended up at the Château de Boussac in central France, where they spent centuries deteriorating in damp and disrepair. The writer Prosper Mérimée, then Inspector General of Historic Monuments, discovered them in 1841 and flagged them as exceptional. The novelist George Sand helped bring them to public attention. In 1882, the Musée de Cluny purchased them.

Five of the six tapestries represent the five senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. Each one shows a noble lady accompanied by a unicorn and a lion, set against a deep red millefleurs background filled with more than 40 species of plants and animals. The coat of arms on the pennants belongs to the Le Viste family, powerful Parisian magistrates of the era.

The sixth tapestry is the one that scholars have never fully agreed on. Across the top of a blue tent reads the phrase: À mon seul désir. To my only desire. Or perhaps: by my own free will.

The lady is returning a necklace to a casket. She appears to be renouncing something. But what exactly? The sensory pleasures of the other five tapestries? Earthly love? Worldly possessions altogether? It is the only tapestry in which she is shown smiling. Theories have circulated since the 19th century. 

The Exhibition Also Looks at What Came Next

The new exhibition does not stop at the medieval period. It follows the unicorn into the Renaissance and beyond, including into the present.

A 2020 Ukrainian emblem on display at the Museum Barberini depicts the unicorn as a symbol of inclusion and minority rights, set against the backdrop of Russian aggression. The exhibition includes a Unicorn sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle, as well as a contemporary tapestry by Suzanne Husky titled La noble pastorale, directly inspired by the Lady and the Unicorn series.

The unicorn has always been whatever a culture needed it to be. That is probably the most honest explanation for why it has lasted this long.

Practical Information

The exhibition runs from March 10 to July 12, 2026.

The Musée de Cluny is at 28 rue Du Sommerard, 75005 Paris, in the heart of the Latin Quarter, a short walk from the Sorbonne.

Métro: Cluny-La-Sorbonne, Saint-Michel, or Odéon. The RER B and C stop at Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame.

Opening hours: open every day except Monday, 9:30 am to 6:15 pm. On the first and third Thursday evenings of each month, the museum opens until 9 pm.

Tickets are €14 full price, €12 concessions. Free for visitors under 18, and free for EU citizens under 26. Admission is free for everyone on the first Sunday of every month. Get your tickets here >>>