Mantua, the Ducal Palace's Wunderkammer is enriched with a unicorn tooth!

At the Ducal Palace in Mantua has arrived a. tooth of the mythological unicorn, the famous monoceros, the horse with a horn on its muzzle that has been written about since antiquity, that is, at least since the fifth century B.C, when Ctesia of Cnidus, physician to Artaxerxes II Mnemon, king of Persia, claimed that in the plain formed by the rivers Ganges and Indus, present-day Hindustan, there lived a kind of donkey with a white fleece and a purple head from which sprouted a white horn near the head, black in the middle and crimson at the tip. From that time, the legend of the unicorn spread until it took the form of the wonderful white horse with a horn on its forehead.

Obviously, we are talking about an object that, in the Wunderkammer of the Gonzaga family, could have been considered, given the knowledge of the time, the horn of the fabulous animal: it is in fact a narwhal tooth, which will enrich the permanent exhibition Naturalia e Mirabilia, set up in the Galleria delle Metamorfosi of the Ducal Palace with the aim of providing a symbolic reconstruction of the Gonzaga’s chamber of wonders, aimed at evoking its atmosphere and suggestions(read here an in-depth article of ours). The narwhal tooth, between the 15th and 16th centuries, was a rare and very expensive object (the value of the object was linked to its rarity, its mysterious origin, its intrinsic allegorical value and its alleged therapeutic properties: if pulverized, in fact, the horn was considered according to the medicine of the time to be the best possible antidote against poison), and until the mid-17th century not even the existence of this cetacean from the northern seas was suspected (at least not in Italy): its long, vine-shaped tusk passed right by as being the horn of the mysterious and mythological unicorn.

“The unicorn,” writes Stefano L’Occaso, director of the Doge’s Palace in Mantua, in the Naturalia e Mirabilia catalog, “was one of the greatest boasts of the Mantuan collection. A first certain attestation of the object’s presence in Mantua is [...] among the possessions of Isbaella d’Este, the marquise wife of Francesco II Gonzaga. An inventory drawn up in 1540-1542, shortly after her death, reports in her Grotta ’una corna di alicorno longa palmi sette e mezo, la quale è posta sopra l’armarii, suso duoi rampini torti de fuora via’. Pieces of unicorn, however, were also present in Mantua more than a century earlier. On February 4, 1404, Anna Visconti, the third wife of Francesco I Gonzaga, received a ’petius de alicorno, cum catenella de argento’; in a list of February 7, 1410, pertaining to the goods given to Paola Malatesta, the wife of Gian Francesco Gonzaga, is listed ’unum frustrum ossii de unicorno fulcitum argento, cum una chatenela alba,’ perhaps the same piece attested six years earlier.”

The horn of “palmi sette e mezo” (or about 175-180 cm) found in Isabella d’Este’s Grotto was often studied in the 16th and early 17th centuries. In 1571, the distinguished naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, who was received by Guglielmo Gonzaga at the Ducal Palace, reported seeing “a unicorn nine palms long and three palms in circumference in that part where it is grafted into the skin, then gradually tapering toward the end. Made into a spiral, it is grooved and twisted, whitish in color.” According to Aldrovandi, the Mantuan horn was one of the two most beautiful in Europe (the other was that of King Sigismund of Poland: he would later illustrate both in his work De quadrupedis solipedibus). After all, in the Renaissance, the horn was synonymous with power: the “Throne of Consecration” of the royals of Denmark, in Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, is built largely using narwhal teeth. And consequently they could not be missed in Italian Renaissance courts either.

It was precisely during the seventeenth century that the object gradually lost its mythical value, although its fortune was hard to die. The Danish physician Olaus Worm finally broke the spell in his 1655 Musaeum Wormianum, later followed by other scholars: unicorns did not exist; what were believed to be their horns were actually teeth of narwhals, a cetacean that inhabits the North Seas and whose male specimens possess a tooth that protrudes from the upper lip to form a tusk up to two meters long. Narwhal teeth were found stranded on the shores of northern Europe, usually without a skull or carcass. Consequently, to many the origin of this object was incomprehensible, and this mystery increased its value. So much so that in 1582 Ambroise Paré, physician to the king of France, could claim that the unicorn was worth more than gold.

At least three representations of the fantastical creature can be found in the rooms of the Ducal Palace in Mantua. A fresco in the Chamber of the Birds, in Corte Nuova, dating to about 1570; in the Petrozzani family coat of arms, on the hexafinestrated bell dated 1593 (Santa Barbara corridor); and in Sante Peranda’s Golden Age, from the early 17th century, now in the Labyrinth room. Now, the painted images are thus joined by the narwhal tooth that in the Renaissance was believed to be the real horn: the tusk at the Ducal Palace, which arrived a few days ago and is already included in the museum’s tour itinerary, arrived after a long journey, complete with certificates attesting that the object did not come from illegal hunting. In fact, Inuit people are allowed to hunt narwhal from August to October, and the harvested tusks can only leave Canada for special reasons. “We believe that the Canadian authorities could not resist the charms of Isabella d’Este,” they say jokingly from the Ducal Palace, “and so ’her’ horn, precisely 178 cm long, now makes a fine display floating over our heads in the Metamorphosis Gallery.”

Pictured here is the narwhal tooth already installed in the Ducal Palace’s Metamorphosis Gallery.

Mantua, the Ducal Palace's Wunderkammer is enriched with a unicorn tooth!

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