THE GILT UNICORN Ringdijk 58 Amsterdam

This is a fabulous animal. Sometimes superstitious people found a tooth of a narwhal, a kind of mammal, on the beach. And that is the beginning of the fable; you can still find these teeth in museums. The story goes back till the old Greeks although they admitted that they had never seen a narwhal alive. The animal could only be captured when it had fallen asleep in the lap of a virgin and this made it a symbol of Christ, who was born out of the lap of the Virgin Mary.