'Lady and the Unicorn' Tapestries Return to View in France PARIS - After a nearly two-year absence and a thorough cleaning, "The Lady and the Unicorn" tapestries have gone back on view at the Musée National du Moyen Age here, their rich colors more vivid than ever. The six tapestries depict a slender, blond woman in a Mediterranean garden with a unicorn and a lion on either side. They were woven in Flanders in the early 1500s by unknown artisans - most likely at the behest of a wealthy family in Paris, but their subject remains mysterious. Along with the Unicorn Tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Cloisters, they are considered some of the finest examples of medieval handiwork in the world. The six tapestries range in size from 9 by 11.8 feet to 12 by 15 feet. Historians believe that five of the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries are allegories of the five senses. In the new installation, they are hung in a dim, square room, progressing clockwise from the most earthly of the senses to the most heavenly: touch (in which the woman holds the unicorn's horn and a flag); taste (in which the woman feeds a bird); smell (in which she holds flowers); hearing (in which she plays music); sight (in which she shows the unicorn his reflection in a mirror). Finally, the sixth tapestry includes text that reads, "A mon seul désir," or "To my only desire." It depicts the woman inside the parting folds of a tent, held open by the unicorn and the lion. Some historians believe it represents the heart, the sixth and innermost sense. "Part of the fascination is that you can have several interpretations," the director of the museum, Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye, said in an interview this week. She added that the mystery over who wove the tapestries and whom they depict had made the Lady and the Unicorn a "kind of Mona Lisa" of the Middle Ages. The museum acquired the tapestries in 1882. Previously, they were on view in a castle in Boussac, in central France. Ms. Taburet-Delahaye said that that a team of five young women had won the bid to restore the tapestries. They completed the work between May 2012 and February 2013. The restoration was funded in part by Japan, in exchange for the tapestries traveling to Tokyo and Osaka last year. After cleaning the tapestries with a micro-vacuum, restorers worked to bring out the colors - a red background bedecked with flowers, animals and orange and pine trees. Chemical analysis found that plant and natural materials had been used to create the dyes - madder root was used for the reds, the woad plant for the blues, and orcein, a dye extracted from lichen, for the purple hues. To repair some patches, they dyed new wool with vegetable elements they had discovered in the restoration process. Restorers also placed new backings on the tapestries. The beguiling tapestries have long attracted the interest of writers. In the 19th Century, George Sand wrote about them in one of her novels. They also appear in "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigg," the 1910 novel by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who uses their trajectory from aristocratic home to public museum as an oblique backdrop to the social shifts of the era. More recently, Tracy Chevalier based her 2004 novel "The Lady and the Unicorn" on them. Ms. Taburet-Delahaye said she hoped that the new display, in the dim, square room, would help viewers see the tapestries afresh. "We're a small but special place," she said of the museum. We'd like people to experience that.