The Lady And The Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

The Lady And The Unicorn (2004) by Tracy  Chevalier is the fifth book I have read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge hosted by Marg at The Intrepid Reader And Baker.  Thank you Marg for hosting this challenge and thank you JaneGS for recommending Tracy Chevalier.  I plan to read more from this novelist going forward.  And please check out Jane's excellent book blog Reading, Writing, Working, Playing linked under blogs I follow.

The Lady And The Unicorn is a novel dealing with a real historical event, the creation in the late 15th century of six beautiful tapestries titled The Lady And The Unicorn.  But to this day these tapestries remain a mystery as to who created them.  Art historians believe it was a collaborative effort involving a team of artists and weavers.  But who were the ladies depicted and what does the unicorn symbolize?  In her novel The Lady And The Unicorn Tracy Chevalier does a fine job of imagining how and why these six tapestries came into being

It is 1490 in Paris when The Lady And The Unicorn begins and Jean LeViste a French nobleman commissions the handsome and very talented artist Nicholas des Innocents to create a series of paintings involving battle scenes and his famiy's coat of arms.  These paintings will be turned into tapestries that Jean Le Viste will be able to hang on his walls and impress his fellow noblemen and the King.  

Nicholas is unsure.  He is an expert painter of miniature portraits of ladies but he has never depicted battle scenes.  Fortunately Jean Le Vistes' wife Genevieve wants the tapestries to depict unicorns and she convines her husband that their guests are not going to want to dine in a room where they are surrounded by war and blood. 

 

Meanwhile Nicholas while he is visiting Jean Le Viste's home is doing what he always does, trying to seduce another young woman who he believes is one of the ladies in waiting at the Le Viste home.  Instead he discovers she is Claude Le Vista:  

Nicholas has a way of causing trouble wherever he goes and later when he meets the De La Chapelle family in Brussells who will be weaving his paintings into tapestries the father of the family Georges De La Chapelle does not like what he sees in Nicholas:

"I had never heard an artist so keen on his own work. He should know better—first designs always change when cartoonists make them into the large paintings on cloth or papers that weavers follow as they make the tapestries. It is the nature of the thing that what looks fine small doesn’t when made large. There are gaps to be filled—figures must be added, or trees or animals or flowers ... I did not address him as Monsieur. He might be a Parisian artist, but I ran a good workshop in Brussels. I had no reason to grovel".

And true to form Nicholas while at the De La Chapelle home supervising the weaving is also making advances on Georges De La  Chapelle's daugter Alienor.  

To my knowledge Nicholas and all of the characters in The Lady And The Unicorn are fictional but they are well drawn and Tracy Chevalier has done her research about this time period and also the process of turning a painting into a tapestry.  And here are three of the actual Lady of the Unicorn masterpieces which are now hanging at the Cluny Museum in Paris:

I am probably not going to be able to read 15 medieval historical books by the end of this year but I might be able to squeeze in five more and Tracy Chevalier has helped me achieve this goal.  The Lady And The Unicorn is an enjoyable and informative novel that taught me about a 15th century masterpiece I never knew existed.