IN 1998, THE CLOISTERS—the museum of medieval art in upper Manhattan—began a renovation of the room where the seven tapestries known as
For centuries, the Unicorn Tapestries were in the possession of the La Rochefoucauld family of France; they hung in the family’s chateau in Verteuil, a town in Charente, north of Bordeaux. Francois, the sixth duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) was a famed author of maxims. Among them is this one: “There is something in the misfortune of our friends that does not displease us.”
In 1789, during the French Revolution, a mob of peasants looted the La Rochefoucauld chateau while the family fled. The family eventually returned to the chateau, but the Unicorn Tapestries had disappeared. Two generations later, in 1855, the then duc de La Rochefoucauld sent word around town that he’d like to buy the Unicorn Tapestries from anyone who might still have them. Some local farming people came forward and sold the tapestries back to the family. It turned out that the farmers had been using the Unicorn Tapestries to cover heaps of potatoes inside barns and to wrap fruit trees during the winter to keep them from freezing. Nevertheless, the tapestries were still in good shape. In the early 1920s, the La Rochefoucauld family, needing money, put the tapestries on display with an art dealer in Paris, and in 1922, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought them for just over a million dollars. He kept them in his apartment on Fifth Avenue, and in 1937 he gave them to the Cloisters. Their monetary value today is incalculable.
As the construction work at the Cloisters got under way, the tapestries were rolled up and moved, in an unmarked vehicle and under conditions of high security, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the Cloisters. They ended up in a windowless room in the museum’s textile department for cleaning and repair. The room has white walls and a white tiled floor with a drain running along one side. It is exceedingly clean and looks like an operating room. It is known as the wet lab, and is situated on a basement level below the museum’s central staircase.
In the wet lab, a team of textile conservators led by a woman named Kathrin Colburn unpacked the tapestries and spread them out facedown on a large table, one by one. At some point, the backs of the tapestries had been covered with linen. The backings, which protected the tapestries and helped to support them when they hung on a wall, were turning brown and brittle, and had to be replaced. Using tweezers and magnifying lenses, Colburn and her team delicately removed the threads that held each backing in place. As the conservators lifted the backing away, inch by inch, they felt a growing sense of awe. The backs were almost perfect mirror images of the fronts, but the colors were different. Compared with the fronts, they were unfaded: incredibly bright, rich, and deep, more subtle and natural-looking. The backs of the tapestries had been exposed to very little sunlight in five hundred years—even, apparently, during the time when they had been used to cover potatoes. Nobody alive at the Met, it seems, had seen the backs of the Unicorn Tapestries in all their richest color.
A tapestry is woven from lengths of colored thread called the weft, which are passed around long, straight, strong threads called the warp. The warp runs horizontally and provides a foundation for the delicate weft, which runs vertically. Medieval tapestry weavers worked side by side, in teams, using their fingertips and small tools to draw the delicate weft threads around the tougher warp. When they switched from one color to the next, they cut off the ends of the weft threads or wove them into the surface of the tapestry. The Unicorn weavers had been compulsively neat. In less well-made tapestries, weavers left weft threads dangling on the back of the tapestry in a shaggy sort of mess, but the backs of these were almost smooth. Kathrin Colburn recalled that as she and her associates stared into the backs of the Unicorn Tapestries, it “felt like a great exploration of the piece.” She said, “We simply got carried away, seeing how the materials were used—how beautifully they were dyed and prepared for weaving.” An expert medieval weaver might have needed an hour to complete one square inch of a tapestry, which meant that in a good week he might have finished a patch maybe eight inches on a side. The weavers were generally young men, and each of the Unicorn Tapestries had likely had a team of between four and six working on it. They wove only by daylight, to ensure that the colors would be consistent and not distorted by candlelight. One tapestry would have taken a team at least a year to complete.
The curator in charge of medieval art at the Metropolitan and the Cloisters is a thoughtful man named Peter Barnet. When he heard about the discovery, he hurried down to the wet lab for a look. He got a shock. “The first of the tapestries—‘The Start of the Hunt’—was lying in a clear, shallow pool of water,” Barnet said. The lab is designed to function as a big tub, and had been filled about six inches deep with purified water to bathe the tapestry. “Intellectually, I knew the colors wouldn’t bleed, but the anxiety of seeing a Unicorn tapestry underwater is something I’ll never forget,” he said. When Barnet looked at the image through the water, he recalled, “the tapestry seemed to be liquefied.” Once the room had been drained, it smelled like a wet sweater.
Philippe de Montebello, the director of the museum, declared that the Unicorn Tapestries must be photographed on both sides, to preserve a record of the colors and the mirror images. Colburn and her associates would soon put new backing material on them, made of cotton sateen. Once they were rehung at the Cloisters, it might be a century or more before the true colors of the tapestries would be seen again. The manager of the photography studio at the Met was a pleasant, lively woman named Barbara Bridgers. Her goal was to make a high-resolution digital image of every work of art in the Met’s collections. The job would take at least twenty-five years; there are roughly two and a half million cataloged objects in the Met—nobody knows the exact number. (One difficulty is that there seems to be an endless quantity of scarab beetles from Egypt.) But when it’s done and backup files are stored in an image repository somewhere else, if an asteroid hits New York, the Metropolitan Museum may survive in a digital copy.
To make a digital image of the Unicorn Tapestries was one of the most difficult assignments that Bridgers had ever had. She put together a team to do it, bringing in two consultants, Scott Geffert and Howard Goldstein, and two of the Met’s photographers, Joseph Coscia, Jr., and Oi-Cheong Lee. They built a large metal scaffolding inside the wet lab and mounted on it a Leica digital camera, which looked down at the floor. The photographers were forbidden to touch the tapestries; Kathrin Colburn and her team laid each one down, underneath the scaffold, on a plastic sheet. Then the photographers began shooting. The camera had a narrow view; it could photograph only one three-by-three-foot section of tapestry at a time. The photographers took overlapping pictures, moving the camera on skateboard wheels on the scaffolding. Each photograph was a tile that would be used to make a complete, seamless mosaic of each tapestry.
Joe Coscia said that his experience with the Unicorn Tapestries was incomparable: “It was really quiet, and I was often alone with a tapestry. I really got a sense that, for a short while, the tapestry belonged to me.” For his part, Oi-Cheong Lee felt his sense of time dissolve. “The time we spent with the tapestries was nothing—only a moment in the life of the tapestries,” he said. It took them two weeks to photograph the tapestries. When the job was done, every thread in every tile was clear, and the individual twisted strands that made up individual threads were often visible, too. The data for the digital images, which consisted entirely of numbers, filled more than two
