Escape From New York

Of course that is the title of a well-known action-adventure film from back in the day, but the film has nothing to do with this post.  No, my subject here is what I did when the incessant hustle and bustle and traffic and crowds and noise of New York began to get to me.

I took a 30-minute ride on the "A" subway line ("Take the A Train") from Times Square northwards, and got out at the 190 Street station.  Coming up to street level, I faced the entrance of Fort Tryon Park, just shy of the northern tip of the island of Manhattan.  A 10-minute walk north through this beautiful wooded park brought me to the peace and quiet of The Cloisters.

The peace and quiet is built into this museum, by intention.  It's a remarkable building.  Designed in a style roughly reminiscent of a medieval monastery, with no less than four cloistered courtyards, it was actually built in the 1930s by John D. Rockefeller to house the medieval art collections of George Grey Barnard and of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The building also incorporates numerous architectural features created for and taken from medieval European buildings.  It includes galleries designed to look like chapels and castles...,

...a restoration of a chapter house from a monastery..., 

 

...and several cloister courts which incorporate elements from various European monasteries.

It would be a mistake to assume that the original sites were pillaged for this purpose.  On the contrary, many of the elements incorporated into the building came from buildings that were destroyed or abandoned, and in many cases had already been pillaged for other uses.  For instance, the chapter house from a deserted monastery was being used as a stable.

When The Cloisters opened, a curator from the Louvre in Paris acclaimed it as "the crowning achievement of American museology."  But the enthusiasm wasn't universal.  Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum, related the story of a French art expert who later visited The Cloisters just once, and never returned.  This man asked, in acid tones, "Please, tell me, if you will, just who conceived this... oh, so romantic place?"  Not the ideal museum for purists or culture snobs, as Hoving drily observed.

I am totally captivated by the art of the medieval European world so I have had The Cloisters in my sights for a long, long time.  Thanks to the design of the building, it rarely becomes noisy, even when well-filled with visitors.  The four courtyard cloisters are made to order for meditative strolling.  The gardens inside the courtyards are filled with flowers and herbs grown in the middle ages, with placards noting the names and uses of the plants in medieval herbal medicine.  The terraces overlooking the forested parkland and the Hudson River are restful places too.

And then there's the extraordinary collection of medieval artworks and artifacts contained within.  I'm actually surprised that I got such good pictures when shooting with an automatic camera (no flash) through the Plexiglas display cases.

 For starters, there was a visiting exhibition of boxwood miniatures from the Middle Ages.  These exquisite carvings are crowded with immense if minuscule detail.  The prayer bead shown in this photo is all of 4 cm across, if that.  Each of the tiny figures was carved as a separate piece, and then inserted and held in place inside the bead with a miniature wooden peg that makes a standard toothpick look like a cave dweller's club by comparison.

In this cloister, the design of columns and their capitals changes from column to column with surprising variety, an intentional display of virtuosity by the builder of the monastery from which these columns came.

Some beautiful pieces of stained glass, preserved from several European churches, highlight the vibrant colours that are one of the lost secrets of the medieval glass artists.

This reliquary is one of the most spectacular of the many beautiful pieces found in the museum.

One of the great treasures of The Cloisters is the cycle of "Hunting the Unicorn" tapestries, the finest extant cycle of story-telling tapestries.  These were sized to hang on the walls of a very tall room, like the great hall of a castle.  Here's one of them.

The crown of the collection, for me, is this extraordinary altar cross, carved front and back, and believed to date from twelfth century England -- likely from the abbey at Bury St. Edmunds.  The figures here are not as small as in the prayer bead but each is a part of one of the five pieces of walrus ivory from which the cross is carved -- as are the scrolls they hold.  With only one exception, none are separate pieces pegged in place.  Each carved figure is about 2 cm tall, give or take a bit, yet they have detailed recognizable facial expressions and their tiny scrolls can be and have been read and translated, and interpreted -- in spite of the extreme abbreviation of many of the inscriptions.

A detailed view of the front, showing the scene of Moses raising the brazen serpent in the desert.  The entire roundel with all its figures and scrolls is a single piece of ivory.

I must have stood staring at this amazing piece of work for 10 minutes at least -- and that's after having viewed all kinds of photos of it over the years.  Truly the work of a master artist.

Even though I spent several hours at The Cloisters, I know there were pieces I missed and others to which I couldn't give as much time as I would like.  I'm sure I'll be back.