Beneath a swollen moon, in a grove where the cherry trees loose their blossoms like slow snow, a violet unicorn keeps her repose. She has folded her legs beneath her in the manner of a creature wholly at ease, and she turns her gaze outward past the edge of the world, as though attending to some music the rest of us cannot hear. This is Blossoming Dream, and into one still image it gathers three of the oldest emblems the imagination has kept: the horned beast of purity, the flowering tree of the passing season, and the moon that presides over them both.
Each of these has a long pedigree. Set side by side upon a single canvas, they answer one another in a way that rewards a slower kind of looking. What follows traces the three threads back toward their sources, and shows why they were always meant to be woven together.
The beast older than the bestiaries
The unicorn did not begin in fairy tales. Its earliest surviving description in the West comes from the Greek physician Ctesias of Cnidus, who in the fourth century before our era set down an account of a swift, single-horned “wild ass of India” in his Indica. Ctesias had served as court physician in Persia, and his report, embroidered though it surely was by the campfire testimony of travellers, gave Europe a beast it would keep for two thousand years. Pliny the Elder later fixed the name monoceros upon the creature in his Natural History, and from those classical seeds the whole later flowering grew.
It was the Physiologus, an early Christian book of beasts and their meanings, that gave the unicorn its most enduring story: the fierce animal, untakeable by force, grows gentle in the presence of a maiden and lays its head in her lap, whereupon the hunters close in. The medieval mind read this at once as allegory, the unicorn standing for Christ and the maiden for the Virgin, and so the beast passed into the bestiaries, the cathedrals, and the great woven cycles of the late Middle Ages. Two of those cycles survive as marvels: the seven hangings of the Hunt of the Unicorn at the Met Cloisters, woven around 1500, and the six panels of The Lady and the Unicorn at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. Curiously, the cherry tree that presides over Blossoming Dream has an old kinship with these works. Among the hundred and more plant species identified in the Cloisters tapestries, a flowering cherry stands prominently behind the hunters as they enter the wood.
The horn itself carried a lore apart from the beast. A powder ground from it, the alicorn, was believed to sweat in the presence of poison and to purify tainted water, and so kings paid the price of a small estate for a length of it. Most of these treasures were the spiraled tusks of the narwhal, the small Arctic whale whose ivory tooth, sold across a credulous continent, sustained the legend long after any traveller had claimed to see the animal alive. The connoisseur of unicorns who wishes to go to the root of the matter can do no better than Odell Shepard’s The Lore of the Unicorn, first published in 1930 and still the most graceful survey of the whole tradition.
The unicorn and the moon
Shepard is worth pausing over, for it is he who drew out the thread that binds the unicorn to the moon above her in this painting. In the old symbolic pairings the unicorn was set against the lion, and where the tawny lion stood for the sun, the white unicorn was read as the moon: the one solar, masculine, and blazing; the other lunar, feminine, and cool. The very whiteness of the creature carries the argument, for white and silver were the colours of the moon in the language of the alchemists, colours of receptivity, intuition, and the untainted mind. When lion and unicorn appear together, the symbolists spoke of the coniunctio, the alchemical marriage in which the solar and lunar principles are reconciled and made one.
The connection runs deeper than metaphor. When the arms of the Le Viste family, who commissioned the Cluny tapestries, were deciphered, the heralds found three silver crescent moons upon a band of blue. The moon was woven into the unicorn’s story from the first, quite literally, in silver thread. To place a unicorn beneath a full moon, then, is to return her to her proper heaven. She is a lunar animal come home to the light that made her, and the painter has rendered that moon not as a cold disc but as a living, swirling presence, ringed in a halo of pale fire, the true sovereign of the scene.
The cherry tree and the doctrine of the passing hour
The blossoms falling through the moonlight bring the third and gentlest of the old traditions. The Japanese practice of hanami, the viewing of flowers, reaches back more than twelve centuries. It began in the Nara period, when the aristocracy gathered to admire the plum, and shifted during the Heian period toward the cherry, whose blooming the Emperor Saga made the occasion of formal feasts of poetry and music at the court in Kyoto. From those gatherings grew a whole aesthetic of the cherry blossom that has shaped Japanese art and feeling ever since.
At its centre lies the idea the scholars call mono no aware, the tender awareness of the passing of things. The cherry is beloved precisely because it does not last. It opens all at once in a great pale cloud and falls within a handful of days, and in that brief and brilliant career the beholder reads the whole shape of a life. The eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga held that the entire task of art was to give voice to this feeling. The warrior class took the blossom for their own emblem for the same reason, seeing in the petal that falls at the height of its beauty a mirror of a life meant to be brief and honourable. The falling petal is the doctrine made visible: loveliness and mortality bound in the same slow descent.
Where the three meet
Set these three together and a single quiet argument emerges. The moon dies to a thread and is reborn, month upon month, the oldest teacher of the truth that endings are only turnings. The blossom falls so that the tree may flower again. And the unicorn, alone among the beasts, is the deathless one, the creature glimpsed only by the pure and never truly taken, a figure of what does not pass at all.
In Blossoming Dream these meet without strain. The unicorn reclines in the very rain of falling petals, the undying amid the dying, and over both presides the moon that reconciles the two. It is a picture of rest inside the turning of things, of the eternal keeping company with the transient and finding it beautiful. Readers who follow such currents will recognise the temper of the Codex of the Outer Realms, whose whole concern is the contemplative reading of ancient symbols; the painting speaks the same language in colour that the Codex speaks in prose.
About the painting
Blossoming Dream is an original acrylic painting on canvas by Rob Medley, worked in a palette of deep violet, moonlit blue, and blossom pink. It is one of a body of original fantasy and visionary paintings offered through Kreative Forge, the independent studio of Rob Medley, and it may be seen in person at the Renaissance and medieval faires where the studio keeps its booth through the season.
The painting is available for purchase. Enquiries, prices, and a fuller gallery of original paintings are all a short journey away. Those who would keep a little of the moonlit grove upon their own wall are warmly invited to write.
