The Unicorn: from Ctesias to the Bestiaries, the Story of a Precious Horn
From Ctesias' Indian wild asses to Pliny's monoceros, from the bestiaries' virgin to the Cluny tapestries: the long history of the unicorn.
The unicorn was not born from Greek mythology. No Olympian god rides it and no hero fights it. It entered European culture through travellers' accounts and treatises on natural history, as a real but distant animal living in India. Only in the Middle Ages did it become the white and delicate creature we know, a symbol of purity, and its horn turned into one of the most sought-after objects in the princely collections of Europe.
The Ancient Sources: Ctesias, Aristotle, Pliny
The first author to describe it was Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek physician at the Persian court, who around 400 BC wrote a work on India now known only from fragments and summaries. Ctesias speaks of wild asses as big as horses, with white bodies, reddish heads and a horn on the forehead about a cubit long, white at the base, black in the middle and red at the tip. Whoever drank from cups made of that horn, he said, was protected from poisons.
Aristotle mentions the “Indian ass” as an example of an animal with a single horn and an undivided hoof. Pliny the Elder, in the eighth book of the Natural History, describes instead the monoceros, the fiercest beast of India: the body of a horse, the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar and a single black horn two cubits long. According to Pliny it was impossible to capture alive. Many scholars think that behind these descriptions lies, at least in part, the Indian rhinoceros.
The Virgin and the Hunt
A decisive step came with the Greek translation of the Bible known as the Septuagint. The Hebrew term re'em, which probably meant a wild ox, was rendered as monókeros, “single-horned”, and the Latin Vulgate used the word unicornis in several passages. The unicorn thus entered the Psalms and the Book of Job, and Christian commentators began to interpret it as a spiritual figure.
The Physiologus, a Greek text on animal symbolism probably composed in Alexandria in the first centuries of the Christian era, tells that the unicorn is small, like a young goat, and so strong that no hunter can approach it. It lets itself be taken only by a virgin: it runs to her, falls asleep in her lap and is captured. Medieval interpreters read the scene as an allegory of the Incarnation, with Christ descending into the womb of Mary.
Tapestries, Coats of Arms and Narwhal Tusks
Between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the unicorn became the protagonist of two famous tapestry cycles. The Lady and the Unicorn, kept in Paris at the Musée de Cluny, presents five scenes linked to the senses and a sixth enigmatic panel bearing the motto “À mon seul désir”. The Hunt of the Unicorn, now at the Cloisters in New York, tells instead of the capture and death of the animal, often read as an allegory of the Passion.
For centuries unicorn horns circulated in Europe, sold at enormous prices and kept in the treasuries of churches and rulers. They were in fact narwhal tusks, from the Arctic cetacean whose male grows a long spiral tooth. The Danish physician and collector Ole Worm publicly explained their animal origin in 1638, but the trade went on for a long time. The coronation throne of the kings of Denmark, in Rosenborg Castle, is covered precisely with narwhal tusks.
The unicorn has also survived in heraldry: since the late Middle Ages it has been linked to the Scottish monarchy and, after the union of the crowns in 1603, it appears beside the English lion in the British royal arms. On its long journey the creature has passed from zoology to theology, from the apothecary's shop to court art, always keeping an aura of rarity: a being that shows itself only to the pure and cannot be possessed by force.