ABSTRACT
In the Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris, the sixth tapestry in a series woven in Flanders in the 1490s – ‘La dame à la licorne’ [The Lady and the Unicorn] – arrests attention. The fi rst fi ve tapestries clearly represent a noblewoman experiencing the fi ve senses: touch, sight, taste, smell and hearing. Yet, there is a sixth. It features the words: ‘À mon seul désir’ [to my only desire]. Debate has raged for almost 500 years whether ‘À mon seul désir’, as the sixth tapestry has become known, represents love, desire, understanding, the triumph of passion, the reassertion of will, or something else. Although we leave authoritative determinations to art historians, we are inspired by this beautiful piece of woven silk, by this tactile and warming image with its vibrant crimsons and glittering gold, an artefact simultaneously aesthetic and functional that invites us to expand our sensory imaginary, to include a sixth sense, but also to explore the ways in which sensing and desire, are intimately linked.
