Musée de Cluny
Gothic abbey housing the enigmatic Lady and the Unicorn tapestries above a Roman frigidarium.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Musée de Cluny in Paris follows the Le Viste family, who wove their own name into six enormous tapestries as a visual pun, a unicorn standing in for a word that sounded like their surname. It traces the Gothic hôtel built over a twelve-hundred-year-old Roman bathhouse, and walks through five of the six tapestries, each built around a sense: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. Then it turns to the sixth, draped differently from the rest, and the motto woven beneath it that scholars have argued over for five centuries. Look closely at what the lady in that last panel is doing with her hands.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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