Hello.
I'm Tom Campbell, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
And I'm standing in one of the most enchanted settings
in Manhattan-- one of the Medieval Gardens
at The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum
in Northern Manhattan.
I'm with Peter Barnet, Curator in Charge of Medieval Art
and The Cloisters.
Peter, I feel as if I've stepped back in time.
I could be in medieval Europe.
What is this structure we're surrounded by?
Well, the founders of The Cloisters
would be delighted to hear that, because that's exactly
what they had in mind.
We're standing in a cloister that comes
from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa in the Pyrenees.
The Cloister is the heart...
- Dating from when?
- Well, dating from the first half of the 12th century.
And a cloister is really at the heart of almost any monastery.
It's usually an opened courtyard,
square or rectangular, like the one from Cuxa
that we're in now, surrounded by a covered walkway,
usually an arcaded covered walkway, on four sides.
CAMPBELL: And those wonderful sculptures...
BARNET: Beautifully sculpted capitals that are typical
of the 12th century Romanesque style.
And The Cloisters Museum and Gardens
really is devoted to the art and architecture
of medieval Europe in the 12th through the 15th century--
essentially the Romanesque and the Gothic period.
And this is one of how many cloisters
that form the nucleus of this?
Well, technically, we have... there are parts
of five cloisters that form The Cloisters.
There are three of them that have very beautiful gardens
like the one here in Cuxa.
And the gardens are developed
with a very careful eye to plants that were grown
in medieval Europe.
This one...
CAMPBELL: Here we're surrounded by the smell of lavender.
BARNET: This is the most decorative garden,
I would say, the most extravagant garden that we have.
And downstairs, in two of the other cloisters,
there are gardens that are carefully organized
around the function of plants in medieval art,
in medieval cooking,
in medieval medicine and so forth.
They're a little more academic.
This one is really just here to be appreciated
as a garden would be today.
- The perfect setting for a summer visit.
- Wonderful.
And The Cloisters also
is built high on the Hudson River,
looking across the river to New Jersey,
and has wonderful views.
The Cloisters is in Fort Tryon Park,
the highest spot on the island of Manhattan.
But it's not just views and gardens.
We're also surrounded by some of the finest works
of medieval art belonging to the Metropolitan Museum.
- It's a great collection that actually rivals
the collection in the main building
of the Metropolitan Museum.
- Okay, well, let's go into those galleries.
- Great.
So we're only a stone's throw from the tower blocks
of Northern Manhattan and Harlem.
But I feel somehow we stepped back in time here.
We're in the cool atmosphere of a medieval chapel,
surrounded by architectural elements and works of art.
It's not like any other museum gallery in America.
- I think that's right, and it's not like any museum,
really, in the world.
This is a very rare museum
devoted to the art of the Middle Ages.
And the intention has always been to show
great works of medieval art in a setting
that conveyed the way these works of art
were originally intended to be seen.
For example, in this gallery, which is called
the Early Gothic Hall,
the gallery is dominated
by three 13th century French limestone windows
with great examples of stained glass,
mostly French stained glass, from the 13th and 14th century,
with natural light that comes through the window, and actually
light bounces off the river and changes with the clouds.
CAMPBELL: You get these beautiful light effects
on the stones.
BARNET: On the floor, and it gives you a sense
of the liveliness of the stained glass
that most museum settings can't convey.
- Quite enchanting.
And then color of a different kind--
this sculpture next to us.
BARNET: We're fortunate to have great examples
of sculpture, like this French sculpture here
that's very large scale,
one which has much of its original polychromy.
And other sculptures in this gallery, some in stone,
and others wood sculpture,
show the way medieval art was made
and is intended to be seen,
and that's often lost in museums today.
Over here I see a window looking down into another chapel,
with more very brightly colored stained glass
and wonderful sculpture.
BARNET: Well, looking through this very beautifully carved
13th-century window, we're looking into the Gothic Chapel,
which has a very large group
of 14th century Austrian stained glass panels
that are really unparalleled, and an extraordinary group
of tomb sculptures.
Around the walls are a group of tomb sculptures
that come from Catalonia, from a place called Urgell.
And then two more tombs in the center of the gallery,
much as they would have been in the medieval funeral chapel.
Now, I know that one of the most popular attractions
for young and old alike is through here,
the famous unicorn tapestries.
Now, The Cloisters are famous for their gardens in the summer.
But this is a room in which the flowers never fade--
the famous unicorn tapestries.
Certainly one of the great treasures of The Cloisters,
and one of the great treasures
to survive from the Middle Ages anywhere,
and probably the single thing that most people
come to The Cloisters to see.
And as you say, they're famous examples of what are known
as millefleurs tapestries, or tapestries with backgrounds
of a thousand flowers,
so that it does convey the sense of blooming year round.
We have a series of seven tapestries that are
extraordinary survivals from the years right around 1500.
They were probably designed in Paris, and woven
in Northern France or the Southern Netherlands,
perhaps Brussels.
Subject is the hunt of a unicorn,
but with an underlying allegorical
and symbolic meaning.
BARNET: Exactly.
- Which we've never quite... around which there continues
to be much debate.
BARNET: There are many questions about these tapestries.
The focus of the tapestries is the hunt of the unicorn,
which is a mythical beast
with this extraordinary single horn in its forehead,
which in the Middle Ages was seen as a symbol of Christ.
And there's a mystical aspect to the tapestries because of that.
One of the great monuments of European tapestry production.
- Absolutely.
- Well, let's walk on
and look at some of the other works of art.
Now, we've left the grandeur of The Cloisters
and the chapel settings
to enter a much more domestic feeling space.
- This is the Merode Room, which is devoted
to this great triptych, the Merode Triptych,
painted in Tournai in the early 15th century.
And you're exactly right-- this gallery is devoted
to private devotion in the late Middle Ages.
And that's a theme that's conveyed by this painting--
it's a fairly small-scale triptych,
one of the great paintings to survive from this period
in the Southern Netherlands.
And it's a revolutionary approach to the subject
of the Annunciation.
You see here in this contemporary
15th century interior from Northern Europe,
the Virgin sitting on a bench reading at prayer,
while the angel Gabriel enters the room...
CAMPBELL: In a domestic setting.
BARNET: In a domestic setting.
Up until this time, most Annunciation scenes
were shown in churches.
But here, because of this new movement, and the importance
of private devotion in this period,
when people in all walks of life were encouraged
to think about the events of the Bible
and the events in the life of Christ as contemporary events,
and to imagine themselves witnessing
the suffering of Christ, and so forth.
The feeling was that works of art could help
in this process by bringing people into the scenes,
by creating domestic interiors.
- And it has an almost kind of hallucinatory clarity to it.
There's such observation of the details.
BARNET: The observation and the quality
of the painting is extraordinary,
and the condition is incredible.
It's one of the great paintings to survive from this period.
It's almost untouched.
CAMPBELL: And I love... I find particularly engaging
this scene of Joseph in his workshop
using the kind of tools
that presumably were used to make the furniture...
BARNET: Exactly.
CAMPBELL: ...by which we're surrounded.
BARNET: It's an extraordinarily finely observed painting,
and through the window you see a view of the city,
a contemporary city, with its church towers outside.
Photorealism, 500 years before the concept was invented.
BARNET: Absolutely.
- This is the early days of oil painting, which was
kind of a new invention at this point.
CAMPBELL: Absolutely wonderful.
Where is our next stop?
BARNET: Well, we'll go to the Late Gothic Hall,
which is a kind of dependent to the Early Gothic Hall
on the east side of the building.
- I think of The Cloisters as being somewhere
that is timeless, and yet in fact
I sense as I walk into this room
that there's been quite a lot of recent change.
We have a tapestry that we haven't had hanging here before,
amongst other things.
- This gallery has undergone quite a lot of change recently.
This is known as the Late Gothic Hall,
where we have mostly 15th century sculptures,
and this wonderful tapestry that came to us in 1938
from the Cathedral of Burgos,
but had been damaged at some point in its past
by being cut into four irregular pieces.
And only recently,
the museum's Textile Conservation Laboratory
was able to reweave those pieces back together.
- You can't even see the drawings, can you?
- It's extraordinary.
And I think one thing that's important to keep in mind
is that the four pieces that the tapestry had been cut into
were in fact in quite good condition,
but the cuts made it difficult to show
and difficult to appreciate it.
The damage is invisible, and we've been able
to restore this to view in this gallery,
the Late Gothic Hall, whose dominant feature
are these four 15th century limestone windows
that come from a Dominican Monastery in Sens in Burgundy.
And the other very striking feature in this gallery
are the sculptures.
BARNET: We have a great group of Late Gothic sculptures,
many very large,
and many with much of their original painted
and gilded surface surviving.
Most people don't realize
that many of these Late Gothic wood sculptures
were actually part of enormous, complicated,
winged altarpieces.
And when they find their way into museum collections,
many of them have been separated from those ensembles.
But we try to at least approximate the great height
that these sculptures would have been seen at
when they were originally made for churches.
- Very striking and dramatic.
Now, here we've stepped back in time.
We're in the Romanesque era.
- Exactly-- we're back in the 12th century here,
in the Romanesque Hall, which really typifies
the galleries at The Cloisters with large scale elements,
wonderful doorways
like the Gothic doorway from Moutiers-Saint-Jean
behind me,
frescoes from Northern Spain, near Burgos, wonderful frescoes
of a dragon and a lion.
CAMPBELL: In both a literal
and a metaphorical way,
this really is a window to the past,
a triumph of imagination and achievement,
and a jewel-like setting
for some of the finest medieval works of art
in the Metropolitan Museum's collection.
The Cloisters are open throughout the year
in Fort Tryon Park in North Manhattan,
and I hope you'll find time to visit them,
whether in the summer or in the fall,
or the winter, or the spring.
There are always flowers blooming here
in one way or another.
Thank you.