Nicolas des Innocents has been commissioned by the Parisian nobleman Jean Le Viste to design a series of large tapestries for his great hall (in real life, the famous Lady and the Unicorn cycle, now in Paris's Musee National du Moyen-Age Thermes de Cluny). In keeping with her bestselling Girl with a Pearl Earring, and its Edwardian-era follow-up, Falling Angels, Tracy Chevalier's tale of artistic creation and late-medieval amours, The Lady and the Unicorn is a subtle study in social power, and the conflicts between love and duty.
If you think you wouldn't raise your skirts for a rakish legend about the purifying powers of a unicorn's horn, then maybe you aren't a 15th-century serving girl under the sway of a velvet-tongued court painter of ill repute. In The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracy Chevalier weaves fact and fiction into a beautiful, timeless, and intriguing literary tapestry-an extraordinary story exquisitely told. The results change all their lives-lives that have been captured in the tapestries, for those who know where to look. There, master weaver Georges de la Chapelle risks everything he has to finish the tapestries-his finest, most intricate work-on time for his exacting French client.
Nicolas creates havoc among the women in the house-mother and daughter, servant, and lady-in-waiting-before taking his designs north to the Brussels workshop where the tapestries are to be woven. He hires the charismatic, arrogant, sublimely talented Nicolas des Innocents to design them. A shrewd French nobleman commissions six lavish tapestries celebrating his rising status at Court. They appear to portray the seduction of a unicorn, but the story behind their making is unknown-until now. A tour de force of history and imagination, The Lady and the Unicorn is Tracy Chevalier’s answer to the mystery behind one of the art world’s great masterpieces-a set of bewitching medieval tapestries that hangs today in the Cluny Museum in Paris.
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