Musée de Cluny – National Museum of the Middle Ages

Museum · Latin Quarter (5th)Paris,France

A medieval collection housed in a Roman bath hall and the mansion built onto it, holding the six Lady and the Unicorn tapestries.

The Musée de Cluny puts its medieval collection inside a Roman bath hall and the mansion later built on top of it. The route starts in the frigidarium, the cold room, where the Roman vault still stands more than fourteen metres above the floor on walls banded with limestone and brick. This is the oldest intact roofed interior in Paris. Rooms of carved stone, stained glass and ivory follow, and near the end a square room holds the six Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, woven around 1500. The two buildings are stacked because nobody wanted to pay to clear the older one. When an abbot of Cluny began a residence on this plot, his master builder set the new house against the standing Roman walls rather than knock them down. That is why you walk out of a bath hall and into a late-medieval mansion without ever leaving the site. The collection arrived later and almost by accident: a private collector rented rooms here for his medieval objects, and after he died the state bought the lot and kept it where it stood. The rooms now run in date order, a change made only in the last few years.

Worth knowing

Good to know

You can see the Roman ruins from the pavement — The roofless hot rooms of the baths stand open to the sky beside boulevard Saint-Michel, and you can look at them without going in.
The battlements are decoration, not defence — The wall with the notched top belonged to an abbot's town house. No fortress ever stood here, and the gargoyles above it were added in the nineteenth century.
The masons' tool marks are still readable — In the service corridors beside the cold hall, the small limestone blocks carry faint traces of the tools that squared them nineteen centuries ago.
Look for the repeating shield — The lion and the unicorn each carry a red shield with a blue band and three white crescents. These are the arms of the Le Viste family, who commissioned the tapestries.
Read the street name — Rue du Sommerard has carried the collector's name only since 1867. In 1220 it was rue du Palais-des-Thermes, because Parisians took the Roman ruin for a palace.

Things to do

1
Find the cold pool at the north end of the bath hall
The first room of the museum is the frigidarium, the hall where Roman bathers finished in cold water. The pool is still sunk into the floor at the north end. Look up at the vault above the pool, then find the two carved stone brackets set high on the wall at that end.
2
Work through the six unicorn tapestries one at a time
Five of the six tapestries each stand for one of the five senses. Look at what the lady in them is holding: sweets for a parakeet, a small organ, a mirror, a wreath of carnations, and the unicorn's horn. In the sixth tapestry she is handling a necklace over an open box, and scholars still argue whether she is putting it on or laying it aside.
3
Look the kings of Notre-Dame in the face
Go to the Notre-Dame room and get close to the stone heads. Study the cut of the beards, the eyelids, the curl of the hair. All of it was carved for a row of statues high on the cathedral front, where nobody standing below could make out any of it. Traces of paint still cling in the hollows.
4
Stand beside the single pillar that carries the abbot's chapel
Go up to the small, almost square chapel at the back of the medieval house. Every rib in the ceiling runs down to one slender pillar planted in the middle of the floor. From this room a spiral stair once took the abbot straight down to his private garden.