The Lady and the Unicorn Tapestries in Paris”

Thursday, October 11
Waterford Public Library

6:15 p.m.           Refreshments
6:45 p.m.           Business Meeting
7:00 p.m.           Program

Dr. Robert Baldwin, Associate Professor of Art History, Connecticut College will discuss The Lady and the Unicorn Tapestries in Paris:  Courtly Love, Female Power, and the Problem of Masculine Courtly Identity

Late medieval court society moved from a “masculine” world of feudal combat to a  “feminine” world of refined privacy dedicated to courtly love, beauty, fashion, polite conversation, gardens, poetry, dance, music, and art.  In late medieval chivalric culture, the legend of the wild and masculine unicorn captured and tamed by a chaste maiden allegorized the courtly theme of “feminine” civilization and love subduing “masculine” passion and violence.  By the 1490s when a social climbing lawyer commissioned a cycle of tapestries on the Lady and the Unicorn as the “Five Senses of Love”, court culture could celebrate love’s pleasures more openly without violating a larger framework of chaste refinement.  By fusing the tamed unicorn theme with the more erotic theme of amorous delight enjoyed through the five senses, the tapestry cycle now in the Cluny Museum quietly eroticized traditional medieval chastity and transformed it into more of an Early Renaissance love fest.