Capturing the Unicorn

Short follow-up to the previous post on Heritage.

After sufficient gentle nagging from my darling webmaven Deb, I finally got around to reading a most remarkable article in The New Yorker (print version) from about a month back, Richard Preston's "Capturing the Unicorn: How two mathematicians came to the aid of the Met."

In 1998, the Cloisters—the museum of medieval art in upper Manhattan—began a renovation of the room where the seven tapestries known as “The Hunt of the Unicorn” hang.

Googling turned up the unadorned text version of the article in the magazine's archives as well as a lovely excerpt with grafix among the Braden Files.

Of course the tapestries had to come down, and it seemed a good opportunity to clean them and also to create digitized images of them for archival purposes. Turned out the tapestries had ideas of their own...