Musée de Cluny - National Museum of the Middle Ages

The Musée de Cluny, the National Museum of the Middle Ages, is a museum of medieval art at 28 Rue du Sommerard in Paris's 5th arrondissement, near the Sorbonne, where Boulevard Saint-Michel meets Boulevard Saint-Germain. It is home to The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries and sits beside Roman baths. Tickets cost €14, and it suits anyone interested in medieval Europe or Roman Paris.

Roman baths and an abbots' mansion

Two very different buildings make up the site. The older is the Thermes de Cluny, the remains of public baths from Roman Lutetia, whose cold room, the frigidarium, still stands to its full vaulted height and displays ancient and medieval stone pieces. The abbey of Cluny acquired the ruins in the 14th century.

Beside the baths, the abbots of Cluny built a Paris town house. The present building went up from the 1480s under Jacques d'Amboise, abbot from 1485 to 1510, in a style combining Flamboyant Gothic with early Renaissance details. It is one of the few large medieval mansions left in the city, with its own chapel and a medieval garden.

Alexandre Du Sommerard's collection becomes a museum

In the early 1830s the collector Alexandre Du Sommerard moved into the Hôtel de Cluny and filled it with medieval objects. After his death in 1842 the state bought the house and collection, joined them with the Roman baths and opened the museum on 17 March 1844. After a long renovation, it reopened on 12 May 2022 with a new entrance and visitor route.

The Lady and the Unicorn and the Basel altar frontal

The Lady and the Unicorn is a set of six late 15th-century tapestries. Five are usually read as the senses, and the sixth remains open to interpretation. The museum also shows sculpture, stained glass, goldwork including the golden altar frontal of Basel, ivories, enamels, manuscripts and everyday medieval objects. Heads of the kings of Judah from the façade of Notre-Dame, damaged during the Revolution, were rediscovered in the garden of a Paris house in 1977 and are displayed here.

23,000 objects with about 2,300 on display

The museum holds about 23,000 objects from the Gallo-Roman period to the 16th century, with around 2,300 on display. In The Lady and the Unicorn, the sixth tapestry carries the words "À mon seul désir" above the lady and her unicorn. A garden opened beside the museum in 1971, with a "unicorn forest" planted in reference to the tapestries. The 2022 renovation cost €23.1 million, part of it paid from France's Louvre Abu Dhabi agreement.