The Unicorn in Captivity (from the Unicorn Tapestries) 1495-1505 South Netherlandish Met acc. # 37.80.6
Fourteenth century poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) in his Decameron of 1348 painted a vivid picture of what a villa & garden of a wealthy Florentine was like. The Cocharelli Manuscript from the late 14C shows members of the nobility standing beside a marble fountain in a garden planted with figs, oranges, pomegranates and grape vines resembling Boccacio’s description "in the midst of the garden a lawn of very fine grass, so green it seemed nearly black, colored with perhaps a thousand kind of flowers……shut in with very green citrus and orange trees bearing, at the same time, both ripe fruit and young fruit and flowers so that they pleased the sense of smell as well as charmed the eyes with shade." This description echos the tapestries of this period…known as the mille fleurs or thousands of flowers.
A Mead is a medieval garden designed to imitate a small meadow or sometimes a larger, natural meadow. A Flowery Mead is a medieval term for a lawn rich in wild flowers. A flowery mead is often one of the essential components of a medieval garden. The flowery mead depicted is seldom within a distinct, geometric, larger garden.
Albertus Magnus (c 1200-1280), a German Dominican friar & a Catholic bishop, was a great admirer of lawns & flowery meads "For the sight is in now way so pleasantly refreshed as by fine and close grass kept short." Most writers recommend digging out the original 'waste' plants, killing the seeds in the soil by flooding with boiling water, then laying out the lawn with curves laid in and pounded well. Another writer recommended mowing them twice a year; lawn mowing would have been done with scythes or primitive shears.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art suggests that Unicorn in Captivity may represent the beloved tamed. The animal is tethered to a tree & constrained by a fence; but the chain is not secure & the fence is low enough to leap over. The unicorn could escape if he wished, but his confinement seems to be a happy one, to which the ripe, seed-laden pomegranates in the tree—a medieval symbol of fertility & marriage—testify. The red stains on his flank do not appear to be blood, as there are no visible wounds like those in the hunting series; rather, they might represent juice dripping from the bursting pomegranates above. Many of the other plants represented here, such as wild orchid, bistort, & thistle, echo a theme of marriage & procreation, as they were acclaimed in the Middle Ages as fertility aids for both men and women. Even the little frog, nestled among the violets at the lower right, was cited by medieval writers for its noisy mating.
