The Lady and the Unicorn

by Tracy Chevalier

First published 2003

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4.2(2,660)

In Paris in 1490, the ambitious nobleman Jean Le Viste commissions Nicolas des Innocents to design a set of tapestries celebrating his status. Nicolas replaces the requested battle scenes with ladies, unicorns, animals and flowers representing the senses. His designs are shaped by desire for the women of the Le Viste household, whose faces and gestures enter an artwork meant to advertise the authority of its male patron.

The designs are sent to Brussels, where Georges de la Chapelle and his family must translate painted images into wool and silk while meeting an expensive deadline. Nicolas’s arrival disrupts the household and draws the blind daughter Alienor into his pattern of seduction. Through designers, dyers, weavers and patrons, the novel imagines how the six Lady and the Unicorn tapestries emerged from collaboration, commerce and private lives divided between late-medieval France and the Habsburg Netherlands.