The Musée de Cluny occupies one of the strangest sites in Paris: a medieval mansion built directly on top of Roman public baths. The frigidarium, the cold room of the baths, is still standing, its vaulted ceiling intact after two thousand years. The mansion above was raised in the fifteenth century by the abbots of Cluny. Together they make the museum before a single object goes on the walls.
The collection covers the Middle Ages in depth, without the usual compromises: carved altarpieces, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, and an entire room of sculpture saved from the great churches. Its centre of gravity, though, is the Lady and the Unicorn, six tapestries from around 1500 whose meaning, after five centuries, has still never been agreed upon.
What you will see
The Roman baths. Below the medieval mansion stands the frigidarium, the cold room of the Gallo-Roman baths of Lutetia, raised around the year 100 and still under its original vault two thousand years later. The Lady and the Unicorn. Six tapestries in wool and silk, woven around 1500, five of them given over to the senses and a sixth inscribed À mon seul désir, a phrase that five centuries of scholarship have never settled. The heads of Notre-Dame. The gallery of stone kings whose heads were struck from the cathedral facade during the Revolution and rediscovered, by accident, beneath a Paris street in 1977. The golden altar of Basel. A panel of Ottonian goldsmithing from around 1020, among the finest pieces of medieval metalwork to survive anywhere.
Roman baths · the unicorn tapestries · a medieval mansion
Pépin's advice
Start downstairs. The frigidarium is in the basement, and most visitors walk past it because they turn right at the entrance. Turn left, and begin two thousand years before the rest of the collection.
Give the tapestries time. The room that holds the Lady and the Unicorn was built to be taken slowly. They reward sustained attention in a way that very few museum objects do.
