Exhibit of the week: Search for the Unicorn

The Cloisters, New York

Through Aug. 18

Doubts about the existence of unicorns might be severely tested in New York City this summer, said Adam Janos in the New York Press. The Cloisters, an upper Manhattan annex of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that has always reserved a special place for the one-horned creature, is celebrating its 75th anniversary with a show that explores the widespread propagation of the unicorn across two millennia. In one room, an 8-foot-tall horn found in nature stands near a 16th-century historian’s tips for distinguishing a real unicorn horn from a fake one. That the tusk once actually belonged to a narwhal barely matters. The entire show is “a surreal juxtaposition of the ethereal with the wild.” It finds beauty and wonder in a human illusion.

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We can blame the Greeks for breeding the whole myth, said Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times. A Greek encyclopedia from the second century seems to be the source of several key details—that unicorns have cloven hooves, that they have purifying powers, and that they can be tamed only by a female virgin. But one of the surprises of this show is how well the myth traveled beyond medieval Western Europe. One 14th-century reproduction of the Shahnama, or Persian “Book of Kings,” shows Alexander the Great battling the Monster of Habash, a giant, one-horned equine that supposedly lived in East Africa. A one-horned beast called a karkadann also appears in a 13th-century Arabic text titled The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence.

Yet this temporary exhibition, “for all its charms,” merely supplies a bigger stage for an artistic treasure that the Cloisters keeps on permanent display, said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. Seven “magnificent” 15th-century tapestries that once hung in John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s home fill one grand gallery of the medieval-style museum. Woven from wool, silk, silver, and gold, they show a unicorn purifying water with the touch of its horn before hunters capture and slaughter it, “its magical grace no protection against the human desire to destroy.” Though the Christ-like unicorn appears resurrected in the final tapestry, the effect of the sequence remains both “exhilarating and sad.” Whoever the craftsmen were who created the Unicorn Tapestries, they managed to dramatize “our conflicting urges to imagine worlds and then crush them.” Even unicorns get no pass.