Wool for the Eyes

By ROBERT HUGHES

Centaurs, parakeets, a curly tailed unicorn resting on a carpet of flowers while pomegranate juices drip on its milky hide; heraldic crests, peasants reaping, Hector girding himself in 15th century steel, slim ladies picnicking in the everlasting green glow of a medieval Arcadia-the great exhibition of 14th to 16th century tapestries, jointly organized by the National Museums of France and New York's Metropolitan, is an exquisite arbor of diversion. Shown last October at the Grand Palais in Paris, it opened in Manhattan last week. It is undoubtedly the most important exhibition of its kind ever mounted, and, coming after the Met's numerous woes in 1973, it reminds us why, as a root of our visual culture, we still need great museums. Organizations like the Met, the Louvre, or (presumably) the Hermitage can be pachydermatously insensitive to the confused needs of their public. But when they move, they move with weight. They can deploy enormous diplomatic clout to get loans, bring together constellations of work that could never be assembled under one roof, and surround the whole with rigorous scholarship. "Masterpieces of Tapestry" is such an event.

Fragile Mats. It begins, chronologically, with the 60-ft. spread of the 17-scene Apocalypse from the Chateau d'Angers, which is the greatest surviving tapestry of the 14th century-and has never been lent to a museum, in or out of France, before. Treasure succeeds treasure: the elegant 15th century Winged Stags from Rouen, the crowded jigsaw scenes from the Trojan War, and-as a bonus-the two most famous allegorical cycles in all 15th century tapestry, here exhibited together for the first time: the Lady with the Unicorn series from the Cluny Museum in Paris and the Hunt of the Unicorn from the Cloisters in New York. Drawn from other collections as far apart as Leningrad, Brussels and Boston, there are, in all, 97 tapestries on view. These thick, fragile, faded mats of intricately worked wool are among the supreme artifacts of the late medieval world, and they exhale a richness which has vanished from our own culture.

No other works of art, except the cathedrals for which they were sometimes woven, absorbed so much collective labor: to see why, one has only to peer at the density of stitching in one square inch of a tapestry and reflect on the time needed to work a surface that might extend for hundreds of square yards. One man could illuminate a Book of Hours. But the fabrication of a hanging might be farmed out among dozens of looms under the supervision of a master weaver. The fact that one of these entrepreneurs, Nicolas Bataille, who took more than three years to make the Angers Apocalypse for the Duke of Anjou, could still deliver five tapestries to the Duke of Burgundy in the course of a year argues a none too primitive form of mass production. The locus of this industry was northern France and the Low Countries, and its centers shifted: Tournai, Brussels, Paris, Bruges-and, of course, Arras, the town which bequeathed its name to tapestry itself.

Tapestry was to northern Europe what fresco was to Italy, or the refulgent gold-leaf screens of the Momoyama period were to the dark castle interiors of 16th century Japan: the main form of large-scale decoration. Moreover, it had two advantages that fresco did not possess: a duke could change his hangings, and they warmed his drafty abode in winter. And yet the appetite for tapestries went beyond all questions of use and ornament. They were collected with manic extravagance. As the Cluny Museum's chief curator Francis Salet points out in his catalogue introduction, Philip the Good of Burgundy was such an impassioned buyer that his collection required a staff of 18 guards and varlets. In 1461, at the coronation of Louis XI, Philip gave the citizens of Paris a crushing display of his wealth by hanging tapestries by the bale from his town-house fac,ade, "such a multitude of them that he had them hung over one another," as one chronicler noted.

Tapestries, in fact, were a kind of bullion, amassed by their owners as an investment. But what guaranteed the value of tapestry also led to its destruction: countless masterpieces of the weaver's art were burned during the French Revolution to render down their gold and silver threads. Others, seen as emblems of monarchical privilege, were simply destroyed. The Met's own Unicorn tapestries were taken by peasants and used to wrap potatoes. Even the Angers Apocalypse served as burlap to insulate orange trees and stuff cracks in walls. This exhibition is only a fragment of what Europe lost.

Epic Amplitude. It is also triumphant proof that high art and decoration can often be the same. The panels of the Apocalypse obey the conventions of medieval miniature painting: the schematic rocks and grass, the abstract wallpaper patterns in the sky. The artist, Hennequin of Bruges, actually based it on an illuminated manuscript. Yet the design of an episode like St. Michael's casting down of Satan and the rebel angels has an epic amplitude: the heavens part in a frill of white clouds, and from it the archangel plunges down to drive his spear into the seven-headed Beast; the coiling rush and flutter of his peach-colored robe is full of an ecstatic energy that belies the flat, heraldic space.

As for the unicorn cycles, praise is an impertinence. They vary in conceptual density. The Cluny Lady with the Unicorn set is a relatively straightforward metaphor of the five senses, so that the mythic beast gazes at itself in a mirror to signify Sight. By contrast, the Cloisters' unicorn hunt is a highly complicated and frequently obscure allegory of the passion of Christ, mixed with references to courtly and profane love. But in each, a way of seeing reality that was both freshly direct and symbolic is embedded in a matrix of almost unbelievable formal beauty. Detail by detail, this is a show to be returned to and never to be exhausted. Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.