what does a unicorn look like?
When I paint a unicorn, I follow no rules. Sometimes they look like horses or foals. Sometimes deer, goats or strange little creatures. Some are soft with shaggy hair; others are angular, feral. I don't think of the unicorn as having one correct body, because it’s never really had one.
The earliest famous written account comes from Ctesias, writing about India in the fourth century BCE. His one-horned creature was a powerful animal, described as a wild ass with a multicoloured horn whose composition was said to give those who drank of it an immunity to poison. Pliny's Natural History, written around 77 CE, later defines the monoceros as a terrible, untameable beast with the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant and the tail of a boar. The unicorn in its infancy seems to have borrowed from other creatures, and perhaps this makes sense. If you've never seen a unicorn, how else would you describe one?
The Christian text Physiologus, composed in the second century CE, proved perhaps the most influential in defining the unicorn. In it, a fierce and untameable white goat-like creature can only be captured by a pure virgin: the creature approaches her and lays its head in her lap. The story was understood as an allegory for the Incarnation of Christ, with the beautiful unicorn representing Christ and the virgin representing Mary. White made the unicorn particularly useful as a symbol of purity, virginity and spiritual innocence, and became an increasingly popular choice when depicting the animal.
By the Middle Ages, the cultural idea of the unicorn had been influenced heavily by this Christian association; medieval bestiaries softened the unruly and fearsome creature of earlier accounts into the image we recognise today: a majestic white equine creature. In part because of this, the unicorn was more marketable than ever. Its commodification overwhelmed its identity; it was gradually becoming more an ideal than an animal. The tusks of narwhals were passed off as unicorn horns and sold for medicinal uses as late as 1741 in Europe, and tableware made from unicorn horn (in reality, walrus, narwhal, or rhinoceros) was believed to act as an antidote to poison. The Royal Mint’s heraldic Tudor unicorn illustrates that by the late medieval period, the unicorn retained only remnants of its older composite nature: cloven hooves, a beard, the tail of a lion.
Perhaps nowhere is this desire to possess the unicorn more explicitly expressed than in the great Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, woven around 1495–1505. They tell a story of pursuit: hunters enter the woods, find the unicorn, chase it, wound it, and finally capture and kill it. The whole narrative is concerned with what it means to find, and to have, something wild and extraordinary. The tapestries themselves are made from fine wool and silk, with silver and gilt threads, and are astonishingly large and intricate. They would have required enormous amounts of highly skilled labour and precious material. The luxury of the object becomes part of its meaning: a magical creature imagined inside an equally lavish object, made for people wealthy enough to surround themselves with such things.
And then there is The Unicorn in Captivity. The unicorn is no longer running through the forest. It sits inside a very small enclosure, chained to a pomegranate tree, a symbol of fertility, surrounded by abundant flowers and fruit. It is safe, beautiful and apparently content. The fence is low and the chain is loose enough that, at least theoretically, it could escape. The image has been interpreted in many ways, as Christ, as a symbol of marriage, fertility, but I am always struck by the work’s ambition. To capture and keep a unicorn, a symbol of impossibility with no chosen form. It is, in a peculiar way, a little bit entitled.
As with much of the natural world, we seem to want to take something that is elusive, strange or uncontrollable and make it more comfortable. We give it a purpose or a symbolic meaning. We give it a standard body. We weave it into a tapestry. We put it on a birthday cake. We make it soft enough to sell to children. The modern unicorn is very recognisable: one horn, four legs, horse’s body, flowing mane, sparkles, rainbows, a total visual shorthand for “magical”. I think this is another kind of captivity. We know what a unicorn looks like now, and it’s domesticated.
So when I make my unicorns, I like to let them be weird. It’s my very simple attempt to sort of rewild the unicorn, and to allow them to be graceful or awkward, delicate or heavy, and to not have to do any symbolic heavy lifting.
