Musée de Cluny (Musée National du Moyen Âge)

The Musée de Cluny, officially the Musée National du Moyen Âge, occupies the Hôtel de Cluny, a late-15th-century Gothic townhouse built for the abbots of Cluny around 1485–1510, standing directly above the remains of Paris's Gallo-Roman public baths, constructed around 200 CE and among the best-preserved Roman ruins north of the Alps. The museum's collection spans roughly the 5th to 15th centuries and includes sculpture, ivories, goldwork, and textiles removed from churches damaged during the Revolution, most notably 21 stone heads from the kings' gallery of Notre-Dame de Paris, decapitated by revolutionaries in 1793 who mistook them for French monarchs and rediscovered in a 1977 excavation nearby. Its best-known work is La Dame à la licorne (The Lady and the Unicorn), a set of six late-15th-century Flemish tapestries displayed in a dedicated rotunda, five depicting the senses and a sixth inscribed with the phrase 'À mon seul désir'. The museum was established in 1843 after collector Alexandre du Sommerard's medieval collection was acquired by the state following his death, combining his holdings with the building and the adjoining Roman baths, which had been protected since the early 19th century. A major renovation completed in 2022 added a new glass-and-stone entrance pavilion, reorganized the circuit chronologically and thematically by material, and opened the frigidarium of the Roman baths to daytime viewing for the first time in decades. The building itself, with its ribbed vaults, mullioned windows, and a private chapel with elaborate palm-frond vaulting, is considered one of the two surviving examples of civil Gothic architecture in Paris alongside the Hôtel de Sens.