Unicorn

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Names & Creature Profile

Unicorn, monoceros and licorne name a beast recognizable by its single forehead horn. Its reputation is less consistent. Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder describes a furious animal that cannot be captured alive. Medieval bestiaries let hunters approach through a maiden. In the Cloisters’ woven hunt, strength and gentleness belong to the same endangered creature. [1][7][4]

Homeland & Tradition

Pliny places the monoceros among the remarkable beasts attributed to India. The same chapter separately describes one-horned cattle; the preceding chapter treats a rhinoceros with a horn on its snout and a habit of attacking an elephant’s belly. His arrangement gives the monoceros a particular place within Roman writing about distant animals. The India of this passage is the author’s geographical attribution, rather than an independently described Indian unicorn tradition. [1]

The Cloisters’ luxury hangings move the encounter into a courtly European world. Dated 1495–1505, they are catalogued as French in design and South Netherlandish in weaving. Costly clothes, hounds, hunting horns and a castle surround the extraordinary quarry. [9]

Appearance & Signs

Pliny assembles his monoceros from familiar animals: a horse’s body, a stag’s head, an elephant’s feet and a boar’s tail. Its black horn projects two cubits from the forehead, and its bellow is hideous. These are more than decorative differences from a white horse. The heavy feet and terrible voice make the creature formidable before any encounter with a hunter. [1]

The Aberdeen Bestiary’s De monocero, on folio 15r, keeps the horse’s body, elephant’s feet and frightening bellow. Its university translation compares the tail to a deer, while the illustration commentary describes a boar-like tail. The horn is four feet long and sharp enough to pierce whatever it strikes. The passage closes with a distinction that leaves little room for peaceful possession: the creature can be killed, but it cannot be taken alive. [2]

Tales & Encounters

The woven hunt gives capture a sustained, visible sequence. In The Unicorn Purifies Water, the beast kneels at a white fountain while other animals gather nearby. The Met interprets its lowered horn as purifying the stream. The hunters pause: the museum’s account of the tradition says the unicorn cannot be disturbed during a magical act. Stillness holds the pursuers back, but only for this moment. [8]

The Unicorn Crosses a Stream replaces that pause with flight. A wound marks the animal’s back; lances converge and hounds close in as it leaps across the water. In The Unicorn Defends Himself, escape becomes resistance. The beast drives its horn into a greyhound and kicks toward a hunter behind it. Surrounded by men and dogs, it is still capable of injuring the attackers. [9][10]

The surviving fragments of The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden show the reversal. The animal looks upward, apparently absorbed in the maiden who has subdued it, while a dog reaches the wound on its back. Much of the maiden’s figure is lost; her arm and fingers survive beside its throat and mane. The standing woman is another figure, possibly an attendant signaling toward a hunter. The capture depends on the quieter, partly missing encounter within the fenced garden. [11]

The Hunters Return to the Castle combines killing and possession. At the left the lances enter the unicorn; in the later moment its body hangs across a horse’s back before a lord and lady with their attendants. Its horn has been removed. The marvellous animal that lowered that horn toward shared water has become a trophy at an aristocratic threshold. The hanging gives the pursuit a dreadful result even while its possible religious allusions invite another reading of the death.

Meaning & Belief

The Rochester Bestiary gives the maiden encounter in miniature. Hunters cannot seize the fierce, goatlike creature, so they leave a virgin alone in the forest. It leaps into her lap and embraces her. The text immediately calls Christ the spiritual unicorn: one horn signifies unity with the Father, fierceness expresses power that worldly authorities cannot comprehend, and smallness expresses the humility of the Incarnation. The movement toward the girl becomes Christ’s descent into the Virgin’s womb. The translated passage turns from capture to theology without narrating a subsequent killing. [7]

The Unicorn Rests in a Garden offers a different kind of submission. A collar and chain connect the beast to a pomegranate tree inside a low circular fence. The Met suggests that it may be an independent image of the beloved tamed: confinement appears willing, and pomegranates suggest marriage and fertility. The hanging’s peaceful animal can therefore be read without turning it automatically into the resurrected quarry of the preceding hunt. Its possible meanings include resurrection, marriage and cherished captivity. [13]

Landscape & Associations

The garden’s flowers also carry sacred associations. In the Met’s interpretation, the iris below the unicorn recalls the Virgin Mary: its blue flowers suggest her clothing, and its sharp leaves her sorrow. White lilies signify purity. The museum links carnations with cloves, whose nail-like shape recalls the Crucifixion. A seemingly peaceful meadow can therefore contain reminders of suffering as well as marriage. [13]

Later Retellings & Reception

The tapestries’ later history has altered what viewers can recover. A 1680 Rochefoucauld inventory records a seven-piece unicorn hunt, nearly two centuries after the works were woven. Repeated entwined A and E letters suggest a patron’s identity or motto, but no convincing match has settled their meaning. The 2013 exhibition consequently treats both patronage and the relationship among the hangings as open questions. The surviving objects preserve much more narrative detail than their surviving documentation can explain. [4]

The hangings also preserve the work of their makers. Dyed and metallic wefts pass over and under wool warp threads; the Met identifies weld, madder and woad as sources of yellow, red and blue. In the hunters’ costumes, weaving imitates velvet, fur, leather and brocade. The violent scene depends on patient work at a loom, and the same threads give substance to the coveted beast and to the people who pursue it. [10]

Nature & Powers

Water purification gives the horn a generous use. The sixteenth-century Italian linen-and-silk band Unicorns at the Fountain repeats pairs of beasts at fountains, their horns lowered toward the cascading water. At only seven centimetres high, it turns a marvellous action into a small repeated ornament. The Met interprets the motif through the power attributed to the unicorn: the dangerous point can also make water available to others. [5]

Variants & Kindred Beings

The unicorn shares the classical page with other exceptional creatures. Pliny places the basilisk nearby, a tiny serpent whose poison makes even a successful blow dangerous. The contrast is one of scale: the monoceros impresses through a formidable assembled body; the basilisk scarcely needs size at all. [1]

Historical Record

An animal reputedly impossible to capture could nevertheless leave an object that wealthy people believed they owned. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, first published in 1646, the English physician and writer Thomas Browne investigates the profitable trade in “unicorn’s horn.” His chapter begins with suspicion of fraud, then takes an unexpected step. He allows that many kinds of unicorn might exist. What he disputes is the easy connection between a name, an animal and an expensive remedy. [3]

Browne lists five supposed one-horned quadrupeds: the Indian ox, Indian ass, rhinoceros, oryx and the creature particularly called monoceros. He also allows examples among fish and beetles. But even writers claiming to describe the same beast disagree. In his comparison, one calls it fierce and another tame; heads resemble a horse or deer, feet an elephant or goat, and size ranges from a colt to nearly an elephant. These are substantial discrepancies. A shared label does not make the descriptions agree. [3]

He next brings the objects themselves into view. The specimen kept at Saint-Denis near Paris is spiralled; those at Saint Mark’s in Venice are plain. The elector of Saxony possesses another plain example, regarded as a land animal’s horn. Ancient descriptions specify black horn, while the specimens familiar to Browne are generally white. Some enormous objects arrive from northern seas. Some fragments are petrified horn, tooth, bone or even wood. A merchant’s convenient name conceals several possible materials. [3]

Physical behaviour supplies another test. Browne reports that many prized specimens fail to soften like familiar horn under heat or soaking, and split rather than powder as expected. Some are parts of a walrus tooth. Others are narwhal teeth, deeply fixed in the upper jaw and projecting forward. His chapter cites a specimen sent from Iceland still attached to the skull. An object that had seemed to require an unseen land animal can now be connected to a recognizable part of a sea creature.

Evidence & Open Questions

Browne’s doubt has historical limits. He remains willing to allow some antidotal quality and reasons from other natural substances credited with such powers. He does not step outside his century’s medicine altogether. His achievement within this chapter is more particular: he makes the confident seller answer separate questions about the animal, the material and the effect, instead of letting the marvellous name settle all three. [3]

One surviving object gives that separation a tangible endpoint. In Eddie Baker’s Met essay, the Cloisters’ INST.1981.8 is a narwhal tusk, the long tooth of an Arctic whale. Baker follows the value attached to tusks in European royal and church collections. The thing displayed under the old idea of a horn survives the correction. It remains extraordinary, but its animal belongs to the sea. [6]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Pliny and the two medieval bestiaries describe different bodies and captures. The Met’s records supply the tapestry sequence and its unsettled interpretations. Browne’s complete horn chapter follows the inquiry into animals, substances and promised effects; Baker identifies the surviving tusk. [1][2][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][3][6]

Natural History VIII.76 ↗
Pliny the Elder · LacusCurtius, University of Chicago · English translation of Latin · Translated by Philemon Holland
VIII.76; Holland chapter XXI, monoceros paragraph
Checked 2026-10-11
Aberdeen Bestiary: Monoceros ↗

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

An ivory horse-like creature lowers its single spiral horn toward a clear fountain in a moonlit garden, with small woodland animals and a complete dark lily frame. — An original horse-like single-horned Unicorn beside a fountain, informed by the medieval imagery discussed in the Met’s fountain tapestry record. This selected portrait is distinct from the composite monoceros described by Pliny; colors and landscape are interpretive.

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