Today, scholars believe that he was describing a rhinoceros. Oh, and it was impossible, he wrote, to capture one alive. Supposedly, said Pliny, the Monoceros emitted a deep bellow, and had a single black horn, almost 3ft (0.9m) long, projecting from the middle of its forehead. Erroneously, they assumed that they must have come from the Monoceros, the Greek name for a one-horned beast described by, for instance, the 1st Century Roman writer Pliny the Elder, as “a very fierce animal” with a horse’s body, the head of a stag, an elephant’s feet, and the tail of a boar. Who could blame them? Few Europeans had clapped eyes on a narwhal – and so, confronted with these long, mysterious ‘horns’, scholars turned to ancient texts, seeking clarity.
As a result, narwhal tusks entered Europe, via a trading network that passed through Scandinavia, eventually becoming prestigious objects, coveted by princes and popes, even though they didn’t know what they were. How did narwhal tusks end up in Europe? In Greenland, where they occasionally washed up on beaches, local people recognised that there could be a market further afield for these strange and substantial pieces of ivory. And, according to Béatrice de Chancel-Bardelot, the curator of the Cluny’s exhibition, Magical Unicorns, people in Western Europe during the Middle Ages believed that rare and exotic narwhal tusks were unicorn horns. The most distinctive characteristic of the male of the species is its long ‘tusk’ – actually, a protruding canine tooth, which can grow up to 10ft (3.5m) in length. In fact, the ‘unicorn’s horn’ on display at the Cluny Museum is the helical tusk of a narwhal, a cetacean found in Arctic waters off Greenland, Russia, and Canada. The base was designed by a postmodern American sculptor, Saint Clair Cemin, who was inspired by a pedestal in the form of a unicorn’s head, conceived by the Italian Renaissance goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini for a similar horn that once belonged to Pope Clement VII. There it was, spot-lit and mounted on a dark bronze base: a tapering piece of tawny ivory, spiralling upwards for several feet. Toulouse Lautrec: poster boy of the Paris elite.The $3bn art collection hidden in vaults.The juvenile joke hidden in a 16th Century painting.I came across one recently in Paris, in an exhibition at the Musée de Cluny, which has a spellbinding collection of medieval art. Or, at least, I can say, hand on heart, that I’ve seen a unicorn’s horn. I’m talking about an actual unicorn, ie a horse-like creature with cloven hooves and a goat’s tufty beard, and, of course, a long, spiralling horn – their most recognisable characteristic – erupting from its forehead. Have you ever seen a unicorn? I don’t mean in a painting or a tapestry, or in the form of a piece of glittery merchandise marketed at young girls.