I reread this book, because I got to see the real Lady and the Unicorn tapestries in Paris last month. I remember loving the book the first time (I read it before I started this blog), but was frustrated that the book did not contain images of the tapestries themselves. When I gave it as a gift to a friend for Christmas, I located images in books and on the Internet, and created a booklet of images for her to go along with the book. The version I now read had at least partial images of all six tapestries.
The tapestries really were amazing. They are hanging in a separate room at the Musee National du Moyen Age - formerly the Musee de Cluny, now the Museum of the Middle Ages. They are quite powerful, each containing a lady, sometimes with a lady in waiting, and a unicorn and a lion. Each tapestry represents one of the senses - sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and the last one is My Soul's Desire. I had a period in life where I loved and collected unicorns and books and stories about unicorns. They are definitely fascinating, phallic, mysterious. I did not remember much about the lions (they are barely mentioned in the book and are not depicted in the partial illustrations of the tapestries in my book), but I was surprised at their docileness, even goofiness.
I remembered really liking this book about the artist, who painted the originals for each tapestry, which would then have to be rendered into large cartoons to place under the looms of the weavers in Belgium, who would then weave the images row by row, never seeing the whole until the tapestry was done. I had forgotten much of the details, and after the convoluted museum brochure that spent most of its energy describing the controversial interpretations of the sixth tapestry, I decided it was just time to reread this book. I knew it was based on as much truth as Chevalier could unearth, and the rest was just a good story about romance and medieval life, and the art of creating tapestries, that I still found intriguing.
The artist Nicolas des Innocents is a portrait painter commissioned to paint the original tapestry paintings, and he convinces the lady of the house Genevieve to ask her husband Jean le Viste for ladies with unicorns instead of battle scenes for the tapestries. Their daughter Claude falls for this rouge of and artist, but of course they must be kept apart. Nicolas goes with the merchant Leon Le Vieux to Brussles, to bring the paintings, get the commission started. He stays a while and helps Philippe work on the cartoons and is fascinated by the blind daughter Alienor of the weavers Georges and Christine. These human encounters give the story of the plot, which otherwise would be simply: rich lord commissions tapestries and they are woven by a workshop of weavers. What gives the book its richness are the details of making a tapestry - getting the right colored wools, how they are sorted and wound into hanks, how various weavers sit all day at the looms, and then at night the women sew the weaving together. I had heard of guilds in my history of Latvia, and there are still the Big Guild and Little Guild building in old Riga, but now I had more sense of how they functioned. They regulated their members, but also insured quality and supported each other.
And now, 500 years later, I could still feast my eyes on the work of the artists and craftsmen, who are maybe still anonymous, but I have a sense that Chevalier has brought them to life, and I am left with a feeling that Chevalier's characters are the real authors of the tapestries I saw in Paris. Plus fun to keep reading about Paris after visiting it.
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