(3 of 3)
TALES of ferocious wild men of hairy mien and brute strength have been hearthside favorites from the days of Babylon's fallen King Nebuchadnezzar, who "was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen . . . till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers and his nails like birds' claws" (Daniel 4:33), down to the celluloid Tarzans of Hollywood. But at no time did the wild men populate the public imagination more densely than during the Middle Ages. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts put on view this week, as its latest acquisition, a 16-ft.-long Rhenish tapestry woven around 1400, one of the world's outstanding relics of the medieval mixture, of man, beast and folklore.
Medieval romances often portray the wild man as a lunatic, and doubtless the dark forests of the Middle Ages harbored many an uncouth idiot or demented outcast. From the held-over repertory of paganism, gossips and telltales invested such men with legendary powers—ferocious temper, ability to rend lions barehanded or smash their skulls with trees or mighty Neanderthal clubs, to ride the wild bucks and unicorns. Their likenesses appeared on the façades of churches, as decoration for manuscripts, and in tapestries. In literature and song, from the Arthurian legends to the ironic romances of Spain's Cervantes, the wild men were fixtures. Edmund Spenser in his Faërie Queen (1590) made Elizabethan eyes roll in describing how the wild man is taught to put his hand "upon the Lyon and the rugged Beare; and from the she Beare's teats her whelps to teare."
A tamer concept of the wild man inspired Boston's newly acquired tapestry. Emblazoned with the family arms of Bluemel (Alsace) and Zorn (Strasbourg), the tapestry unrolls a legend more bewitching than forbidding. The artist designer, in giving free rein to his fancy, incorporated a world of friendly animals, forest flowers, wild men bedecked with crowns of leaves, and, as an extra fillip of delight, exotic blackamoors and a besieged castle of love. And the craftsmen who wove it worked well. Five and a half centuries later, it still keeps its freshness and true woodland colors.
* Last year New York's Metropolitan Museum spent $1,170,912 on new purchases.