Art: Wool for the Eyes

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Tapestry was to northern Europe what fresco was to Italy, or the refulgent gold-leaf screens of the Momoyama period were to the dark castle interiors of 16th century Japan: the main form of large-scale decoration. Moreover, it had two advantages that fresco did not possess: a duke could change his hangings, and they warmed his drafty abode in winter. And yet the appetite for tapestries went beyond all questions of use and ornament. They were collected with manic extravagance. As the Cluny Museum's chief curator Francis Salet points out in his catalogue introduction, Philip the Good of Burgundy was such an impassioned buyer that his collection required a staff of 18 guards and varlets. In 1461, at the coronation of Louis XI, Philip gave the citizens of Paris a crushing display of his wealth by hanging tapestries by the bale from his town-house façade, "such a multitude of them that he had them hung over one another," as one chronicler noted.

Tapestries, in fact, were a kind of bullion, amassed by their owners as an investment. But what guaranteed the value of tapestry also led to its destruction: countless masterpieces of the weaver's art were burned during the French Revolution to render down their gold and silver threads. Others, seen as emblems of monarchical privilege, were simply destroyed. The Met's own Unicorn tapestries were taken by peasants and used to wrap potatoes. Even the Angers Apocalypse served as burlap to insulate orange trees and stuff cracks in walls. This exhibition is only a fragment of what Europe lost.

Epic Amplitude. It is also triumphant proof that high art and decoration can often be the same. The panels of the Apocalypse obey the conventions of medieval miniature painting: the schematic rocks and grass, the abstract wallpaper patterns in the sky. The artist, Hennequin of Bruges, actually based it on an illuminated manuscript. Yet the design of an episode like St. Michael's casting down of Satan and the rebel angels has an epic amplitude: the heavens part in a frill of white clouds, and from it the archangel plunges down to drive his spear into the seven-headed Beast; the coiling rush and flutter of his peach-colored robe is full of an ecstatic energy that belies the flat, heraldic space.

As for the unicorn cycles, praise is an impertinence. They vary in conceptual density. The Cluny Lady with the Unicorn set is a relatively straightforward metaphor of the five senses, so that the mythic beast gazes at itself in a mirror to signify Sight. By contrast, the Cloisters' unicorn hunt is a highly complicated and frequently obscure allegory of the passion of Christ, mixed with references to courtly and profane love. But in each, a way of seeing reality that was both freshly direct and symbolic is embedded in a matrix of almost unbelievable formal beauty. Detail by detail, this is a show to be returned to and never to be exhausted. Robert Hughes