Medieval Cloisters Museum in Manhattan

Saturday, 22 December 2007 21:20

New York City - The Cloisters tower, gray and severe, perfectly framed by the living room window of my apartment. The Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval outpost, is about a quarter-mile to the south, on a hill a little higher than the one my building is on, near the stony tip of northern Manhattan. In between is a valley of rooftops, garages and streets. Above, open sky, clouds, the moon, stars. From the winding stone staircase up to the museum; to the Gothic chapel with its looming, sad-eyed Burgundian Virgin; to a pillared courtyard arcade — one of the four cloisters that give the museum its name.

For 20 years I’ve seen the Cloisters from this vantage, in every season, all weather. The trees of Fort Tryon Park fill out around it in spring, and go gold and brown in fall. In a blizzard the tower, which looks both militant and monastic, softens to an apparition. On cold, clear nights it’s a spaceship poised for flight with a single ruby light, like a bright little planet Mars at its peak, a beacon and warning to planes.

That light is on now as I write, but I won’t be seeing it for much longer. In a month I’m moving to a new apartment, for the usual New York reason: a little more space, in my case for books. I amassed most of my library over the past two decades, though a few things are older, including a sturdy little black-and-white “Guide to the Cloisters,” which I picked on my first visit there, on a pre-Christmas trip to New York City with my family in the early 1960s.

The Cloisters didn’t start romantic; it was a product of hard cash and shrewd decisions in the 1930's.  A decade earlier a turreted mansion had stood on the spot, the home of C. K. G. Billings, a self-described “capitalist at large” who kept a staff of 23 servants and a fleet of 13 cars. In 1916 he sold the place to John D. Rockefeller Jr., who offered to donate the land to the city as a park. No thanks, said the city, too much upkeep. Rockefeller rented out the house; it burned down 10 years later.

Before that, though, an American sculptor named George Grey Barnard (1863-1938), who lived in the area, had used a stable on the property as a studio. Barnard had spent time in France, where he had supported himself largely as a dealer in medieval art. He started by selling sculptural fragments he found in the countryside or bought cheap from local dealers, then architectural elements, including complete portals and cloisters.

In 1913 the French government woke up and passed a law restricting the export of “cultural heritage.” Two days before the law took effect, Barnard sent a shipload of Romanesque and Gothic material to New York, where he built his own public museum in Upper Manhattan, calling it the Cloisters. Rockefeller was a visitor and soon became a major client, buying the entire collection for the Met.

He also gave land (and money for its upkeep) to the city, and stipulated that four acres on the northernmost edge of what would become Fort Tryon Park be reserved for a new museum. Then he bought 700 acres of land across the Hudson in New Jersey to ensure the museum would have a nice view. Building began in 1935; three years later the Cloisters opened.

The museum wasn’t so much built as assembled. Certain features, like the tower, were brand new, though vaguely based on European models. From a skeptical scholar’s perspective, the result is a cut-and-paste job. To me it represents American Theme Park Style, which is by now a solid historical genre, and one with a long 20th-century pedigree ranging from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to Old Sturbridge Village to aspects of Disney World. In most cases the goal is less historical truth than atmospheric verisimilitude.

The Cloisters is an important variant on this, what you might call earnest ersatz. It offers an imaginary Middle Ages, but one with real medieval art in it. The demand for this medievalist fantasy has always been strong in the United States. The robber barons of the Gilded Age, with their castle keeps and Anglo-Saxon pieties, looked back to feudalism with a certain fondness. The first time I saw the Cloisters, “Camelot” was the rage on Broadway. Within a few years its clubby, sentimental image of a chivalrous court would define an American presidency.

Nor has the appeal of the Middle Ages — the age of holy wars, plagues, miracles, magic, religion and aristocratic rule — diminished. It was evident in the cult that grew up around Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” books, and later in the game “Dungeons & Dragons,” Goth culture and the “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter” franchises. In politics it echoed in the presidential call to crusade after 9/11.

Unsurprisingly, historians’ take on the medieval age is complex, with many conflicting views. Was it an era of progressive intellectual vigor and spiritual enlightenment to which the Renaissance was merely a capstone? Or was it a period of Darwinian brutality and mechanistic thinking, to which Renaissance humanism finally, mercifully, put an end?

At least on the surface the Cloisters projects the benign aspect of the story. Some of the most exquisite objects in any part of the Met’s vast collection are on permanent view here, many of them since 1938. These include monumental ensembles like the cloisters themselves, with tiny carved figures half-hidden in their capitals; the unicorn tapestries, a 1937 Rockefeller gift, with their all-over fields of flowers; and the alabaster altar carved by Francí Gomar in 15th-century Spain, its tender scenes from the lives of saints restored to mellow brightness by a recent cleaning.

What I come back for, though, are individual images. One is that Virgin from Burgundy, with her heavy, grave face, and her body hunched forward protectively over the figure of her child. (After years of sitting uncovered on the Langon chapel altar, she’s now herself protected by a Plexiglas vitrine.)

A spidery stone angel hovering en pointe nearby is, in contrast, seemingly weightless. So is an almost life-size standing Virgin from Strasbourg Cathedral placed high on the wall of the Early Gothic Hall, and the two adorable beaming angels who keep her company. Downstairs the pink-cheeked head of a Virgin — a rare fragment of Bohemian Gothic terra cotta — has a comparable buoyancy, as does a painting of St. Clare reaching for a Lenten palm frond, and the tiny ivory reliefs in the Cloisters’ treasury room.

One ivory, a recent addition, is based on a fanciful secular literary theme, the assault on the Castle of Love. Cupid is on the ramparts firing darts at the charging knights, while the castle’s female defenders do their part by tossing roses and kisses down from the walls. This is the romantic, nostalgia-laced Middle Ages that C. S. Lewis wrote about in “The Allegory of Love,” a world in which, for a lustrous moment, the codes and courtesies of courtly devotion regulated all, and the profane and spiritual were one.

But the moment was brief. Then there was reality, and that’s at the Cloisters too, if you look for it. For all their thousands of flowers and Christian imagery, the unicorn tapestries are about hunting, about using spears, dogs and noise to drive an animal into a pen. The Burgundian Virgin is sad for a reason: She already sees, with her great glass eyes, the mortal future of her son, a future which, in sculptural terms, has already arrived. The figure of the child perched on her knee is physically ruined, his head broken off by rough handling or wear and tear. This is the other side of the medieval picture: base cruelty, the anguish of loss, the anxious, half-believed-in hope for renewal.

Of course I didn’t see any of this in 1960. My mind was on — what? — the tomb figures of armored knights, the moody monastic light, the snowstorm outside. You grow into art; or it grows in you. This takes immersion and time. The Cloisters, while barely changing at all, has changed a lot for me over the years, becoming a more complicated and contemplative experience — about art history, American history, pseudo-history, my history — whether I’m actually there or watching from my window. Steady means something in the Middle Age of a life.
By . . Holland Cotter

The Cloisters is in Fort Tryon Park, Washington Heights. Open Tuesdays through Sundays. 9:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. (through February); closed Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. (212) 923-3700; metmuseum.org/cloisters/events/. Admission by donation, $20; $15 for 65+; $10 for students; free for children under 12 and members.