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Musée Cluny: musée national

du moyen âge


This museum has an eclectic mix of personal relics and architectural remains from the Middle Ages. Tapestries formed a large part of the museum's collection. It's unbelievable that people sewed them by hand, but there's also a cartoonish quality about them that shows how the embroiderers sometimes "cheated." The empty space on many of the tapestries are covered in the same flower-and-leaf motifs; sometimes, the same person was depicted in an identical pose on more than one tapestry.

A tapestry

The most famous tapestries in the museum, La Dame à la Licorne, is a series that shows the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. A woman is shown in each one, listening to music, smelling a flower, etc. and beside her is a unicorn.

La Dame a la Licorne tapestry

The quality of the tapestries is not exceptional, but they are famous because of their mystery. For a long time, scholars wondered about the significance of the unicorn and the topic of the tapestries. Now, it's widely believed that the unicorn was simply part of a coat-of-arms since many medieval families chose animals to represent them. The tapestries' fame reminds me of the Mona Lisa: people's obsession with the identity of the painting and the reason for the woman's smile are what make it famous. Perhaps someday, once those mysteries are solved, there will be less of a hype surrounding the Mona Lisa. (-Lisa)