Art: Wool for the Eyes

Centaurs, parakeets, a curly tailed unicorn resting on a carpet of flowers while pomegranate juices drip on its milky hide; heraldic crests, peasants reaping, Hector girding himself in 15th century steel, slim ladies picnicking in the everlasting green glow of a medieval Arcadia-the great exhibition of 14th to 16th century tapestries, jointly organized by the National Museums of France and New York's Metropolitan, is an exquisite arbor of diversion. Shown last October at the Grand Palais in Paris, it opened in Manhattan last week. It is undoubtedly the most important exhibition of its kind ever mounted, and, coming after the Met's numerous woes in 1973, it reminds us why, as a root of our visual culture, we still need great museums. Organizations like the Met, the Louvre, or (presumably) the Hermitage can be pachydermatously insensitive to the confused needs of their public. But when they move, they move with weight. They can deploy enormous diplomatic clout to get loans, bring together constellations of work that could never be assembled under one roof, and surround the whole with rigorous scholarship. "Masterpieces of Tapestry" is such an event.

Fragile Mats. It begins, chronologically, with the 60-ft. spread of the 17-scene Apocalypse from the Château d'Angers, which is the greatest surviving tapestry of the 14th century-and has never been lent to a museum, in or out of France, before. Treasure succeeds treasure: the elegant 15th century Winged Stags from Rouen, the crowded jigsaw scenes from the Trojan War, and-as a bonus-the two most famous allegorical cycles in all 15th century tapestry, here exhibited together for the first time: the Lady with the Unicorn series from the Cluny Museum in Paris and the Hunt of the Unicorn from the Cloisters in New York. Drawn from other collections as far apart as Leningrad, Brussels and Boston, there are, in all, 97 tapestries on view. These thick, fragile, faded mats of intricately worked wool are among the supreme artifacts of the late medieval world, and they exhale a richness which has vanished from our own culture.

No other works of art, except the cathedrals for which they were sometimes woven, absorbed so much collective labor: to see why, one has only to peer at the density of stitching in one square inch of a tapestry and reflect on the time needed to work a surface that might extend for hundreds of square yards. One man could illuminate a Book of Hours. But the fabrication of a hanging might be farmed out among dozens of looms under the supervision of a master weaver. The fact that one of these entrepreneurs, Nicolas Bataille, who took more than three years to make the Angers Apocalypse for the Duke of Anjou, could still deliver five tapestries to the Duke of Burgundy in the course of a year argues a none too primitive form of mass production. The locus of this industry was northern France and the Low Countries, and its centers shifted: Tournai, Brussels, Paris, Bruges-and, of course, Arras, the town which bequeathed its name to tapestry itself.