Jameson describes an elaborate representation of the Holy Hunt which stands over the altar in Breslau Cathedral, and the same subject is treated in stained glass at Bourges, Erfurt, Caen, Lyons, and many other places. Botolph's of Boston, and in at least half a dozen parish churches. George's of Windsor, in the chapel of Durham Castle, in St. Although the animal's figure was not so much used in England as in Europe, I have seen him represented on misericords in Lincoln Cathedral, in St. Formerly he had been depicted chiefly in manuscripts and it is clear that his increased popularity was due in some degree to the rapid intensification of Mariolatry. A more perfect example of the divided allegiance of the Renaissance could hardly be imagined yet, in spite of these difficulties, the artists of the time made the unicorn at least as credible as the animals they had before their eyes, and usually far more graceful.įrom the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, representation of the unicorn in ecclesiastic decoration was continuous and widespread. Early representations of the animal show cloven hoofs on the fore feet and solid hoofs behind, or vice versa they show a goat's beard on a horse's head or even the body of a goat with the head of a horse. The faithful did not know what to think, and in default of a Thomas Aquinas to resolve the apparent discrepancies between Aristotle and Physiologus they tried to believe in a unicorn somewhat like a goat and somewhat like a horse at the same time. Aristotle had said that the unicorn's hoof is solid, on the excellent ground that animals with divided hoofs have two horns when they have any horns at all but on the other hand, Physiologus declared that the unicorn resembles a little goat, and the goat has a divided hoof. The results of this miscegenation were a series of hybrid variations as perplexing as those governed by the Mendelian law. As soon as we begin to inquire how he looked to the imagination of the Ages of Faith we are reminded that his ancestry is mixed, that he descends from the horse and the ass on the side of the Greeks and from the goat on that of Physiologus. THE unicorn is one of the most beautiful of the "shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses", but he did not attain his beauty all at once. Lore of the Unicorn, by Odell Shepard,, at ![]() ![]() Sacred Texts Miscellaneous Legendary Creatures Index Previous Next
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