For most of its life in art, the unicorn was not make believe. Monks, weavers, painters and naturalists treated it as a real animal living somewhere far away, with a horn that fought poison and a temper only a virgin could calm.
In art, the unicorn can stand for Christ, a bride, a family's pride, a cure or an ornament, depending on who made the work. In each of these twelve, I ask the same question. What did the maker think a unicorn was?
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How These Were Chosen
A unicorn work earned its place here when at least one of these holds: a text, an inscription or a museum record tells us what its maker took the unicorn to be, or the work changed how later artists drew the animal. In every case the unicorn had to carry the meaning of the work, not just decorate it.
12. Gustave Moreau, The Unicorns (about 1885)
Women in jeweled gowns gather on a wooded island, and one of them lies almost naked in the foreground. Two have their arms around unicorns, which stay perfectly still. In the distance is the ship that brought them there.
Gustave Moreau, the Paris painter of myths and legends, never dated the canvas. He did describe it. In his words it was "an enchanted isle with a gathering of women, only women," a precious pretext for every ornament he wanted to paint.
The unicorns are not even in that sentence. For the medieval weavers Moreau admired, the animal was a creature of God with a fixed meaning. For him it had become one more rich object to arrange among the brocades and the jewels.
His starting point was The Lady and the Unicorn, the six tapestries that the Musée de Cluny in Paris bought in 1882. He blended their medieval motifs with Renaissance ones.
The landscape came from an allegory by Lorenzo Costa in the Louvre, and many medieval details from engravings in Le Magasin pittoresque, a popular illustrated magazine.
The old signs of purity are all still on the canvas. One woman holds a lily beside a jeweled sword. The two unicorns let themselves be held, as the legend said they would only for virgins.
Moreau is counted among the Symbolists, the name French poets gave their movement in 1886, which soon spread to painting. Its artists preferred dreams and legends to the world outside the window.
The museum calls this canvas one of the most enigmatic works he left.
The gown embroidered with Saint George and the dragon shows what Moreau did with the old stories. The great fight of the legends has shrunk to a pattern on a dress, in a picture where nobody hunts the unicorn anymore.
Near the bottom right stands a chalice, which the museum suggests may be the Holy Grail.
Moreau kept the painting in his studio. On July 14, 1887, the collector Émile Straus saw it there and wrote: "I saw one of the most beautiful things that I have ever seen in my life!"
At a Glance
Artist: Gustave Moreau (1826 to 1898)
Painted: Undated, about 1885 (it was in his studio by July 1887)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 115 × 90 cm (45 1/4 × 35 3/8 in)
Where to see it: Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris
About This Painting
Who commissioned Gustave Moreau's The Unicorns?
The collector Edmond de Rothschild commissioned it and wanted Moreau to take the surface further. Moreau refused to part with the canvas. He gave Rothschild a carefully finished watercolor instead, David Dancing in front of the Ark, whose whereabouts are now unknown.
Where is The Unicorns hung in the Gustave Moreau Museum?
Moreau's The Unicorns hangs in the large studio on the third floor of his house in Paris, which is now the museum.
What is the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris?
The Musée Gustave Moreau is the painter's own house and studios, which he left to the French State in 1897. It opened to the public in 1903 and still holds the paintings, watercolors and thousands of drawings he kept until his death.
11. Bendix Grodtschilling, The Coronation Chair of the Danish Kings (1662 to 1671)
A tall chair of pale ivory stands in the long Knights' Hall of Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen. Gilt figures decorate its frame, and three silver lions stand in front of it.
King Frederik III had it made by Bendix Grodtschilling between 1662 and 1671, and in its own day it was said to be made of unicorn horn.