The Cloisters is a museum in Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, New York City specializing in European medieval architecture, sculpture, and decorative arts. Its architectural features are largely from the Romanesque and Gothic periods. The building centers on four cloistersâ€"the Cuxa, Bonnefont, Trie, and Saint-Guilhem cloistersâ€"sourced from French monasteries and abbeys. They were excavated from Europe and between 1934 and 1939 reconstructed in a four-acre site in Washington Heights, during a large scale and complex project overseen by the architect Charles Collens. Home to over 1000 medieval artworks, including stone and wood sculptures, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings, the building also contains early medieval gardens and a series of indoor chapels and thematic spaces, including the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish and Gothic rooms.
Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its early collection was built by the American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard, which was acquired by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who in 1931 purchased the site at Washington Heights as a permanent home for the works.
The design, layout, and ambiance of the building is intended to evoke a sense of the Medieval European monastic life through its architecture. The museum contains approximately five thousand medieval works of art from the Mediterranean and Europe, mostly from the 12th to 15th centuriesâ€"that is, from the Byzantine to the early Renaissance periodsâ€"but also works dating from the bronze and early iron ages.
Formation and history
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The basis for the museum comes from the medieval art collection of George Grey Barnard, an American sculptor and collector, who almost single-handedly established a medieval-art museum near his home in Fort Washington. Barnard was a risk taker, and led most of his life on the edge of poverty. His main income came from sourcing medieval architectural artifacts; supplemented by trading more established works of art as he built up a large personal collection. During one of his frequent financial crises, Barnard sold his stock to the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., works and structures that became the foundation and core of the Cloisters museum.
The design for the 66.5-acre (26.9Â ha) site at Fort Tryon Park was commissioned by Rockefeller in 1917, when he purchased the Billings Estate and other properties in the Fort Washington area and hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of one of the designers of Central Park, and the Olmsted Brothers firm to create a park, which he donated to New York City in 1935. Rockefeller and Barnard were polar opposites in temperament and did not get along; Rockefeller was reserved, Barnard exuberant. Rockefeller was severely impacted by the stock market crash. Eventually he acquired Barnard's collection for around $700,000, and financed the building of the site at Fort Tryon Park.
The Cloisters building and adjacent 4-acre (1.6 ha) gardens were designed by Charles Collens. It incorporates elements from abbeys in Catalan, Occitan and French origins. Parts from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, Trie-sur-Baïse, and Froville were disassembled stone-by-stone and shipped to New York City, where they were reconstructed and integrated into a cohesive whole. In 1988, the Treasury Gallery within the Cloisters, containing objects used for liturgical celebrations, personal devotions, and secular uses, was renovated. Other galleries were refurbished in 1998 and 1999. Construction took place over a five-year period beginning in 1934. He bought several hundred acres of the New Jersey Palisades, which he donated to the State of New Jersey in an effort to preserve the view from the museum.
The Cloisters is a well-known New York City landmark and has been used as a filming location. In 1948, the filmmaker Maya Deren used its ramparts as a backdrop for her experimental film Meditation on Violence. In the same year, German director William Dieterle used the Cloisters as the location for a convent school in his film Portrait of Jennie. The 1968 film Coogan's Bluff used the site's pathways and lanes for a scenic motorcycle chase.
Exterior and gardens
The exterior building is influenced by and contains elements from the 13th-century church at Saint-Geraud at Monsempron, France, from which the northeast end of the building borrows especially. It was mostly designed by Collins, who was influenced by works from Bernard's collection. The exterior building houses a number of architecture elements and settings relocated mostly from four French medieval abbeys, which between 1934 and 1939 were transported, reconstructed and integrated with new buildings, in a project overseen by the architect Charles Collens.
The builder's main concern was to provide an architectural feature that would memorialize the north hill, as a reminder of he area's history in the American Revolution, while also provide views over the Hudson River. The exterior was built from 1935, and contains stone from a number of European sources, primarily limestone and granite. It includes four Gothic windows from the refectory at Sens, and nine arcades. The rounded Fuentidueña Chapel was especially difficult to fit into the planned area.
The Cloisters is fortified, as would have been the original churches and abbeys, and during the periods of invasion gardens would have been essential for community survival. Today Cloister's gardens contain a wide variety of mostly rare medieval species, amounting to over 250 genera of plants, flowers, herbs and trees, making it one of the world's most important collection of specialized gardens. Their design was overseen during the museum's construction by James Rorimer, aided by Margaret Freeman, who conducted extensive research into the keeping of plants and their symbolism in the Middle Ages. Today the gardens are tended to by a staff of horticulturalists; the senior members are also historians of medieval gardening techniques.
Cloisters
Cuxa
The Cuxa Cloisters, located on the south side of the building, are structurally and thematically the museum's centerpiece. They are from the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, on the slopes of Mount Canigou in the northeast French Pyrenees, founded in 878. The monastery was abandoned in 1791, with around half of it relocated to New York between 1906 and 1907. Until then it had been in disrepair; its roof had collapsed in 1835, followed by its bell tower in 1839. They were then acquired by John D. Rockefeller Jr in 1925, and their installation was one of the first major undertakings by the Metropolitan after it had acquired and absorbed his purchase of Barnard's collection. After intensive work over fall and winter 1925â€"26, the Cuxa cloister was opened to the public on April 1, 1926.
The Cuxa cloisters are placed at the center of the museum; its quadrangle-shaped garden once formed a center around which monks slept in cells. Its original garden seemed to have been lined by walkways around adjoining arches lined with capitals enclosing the garth. The oldest plan of the original building describes lilies and roses. It is impossible now to represent solely medieval species and arrangements; those in the Cuxa cloister garden are approximations by botanists specializing in medieval history. The intersection of the two walkways contains an eight-sided fountain.
The walls are modern, while the original capitals and columns were cut from pink Languedoc marble from the Pyrenees. The capitals were carved at different points in the abbey's history, and thus contain a variety of forms and abstract geometric patterns, including scrolling leaves, pine cones, sacred figures such as Christ, the Apostles, and angels, as well as monstrous creatures such as two-headed animals, lions restrained by apes, mythic hybrids, monstrous mouths consuming naked human torsos, and a mermaid.
The motifs are derived from popular fables, or represent the brute forces of nature or evil, or are based on late 11th and 12th century monastic writings, such as those by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090â€"1153). The order in which the capitals were originally placed is unknown, making their interpretation especially difficult, although a sequential and continuous narrative was probably not intended. According to art historian Thomas Dale, to the monks, the "human figures, beasts, and monsters" may have represented the "tension between the world and the cloister, the struggle to repress the natural inclinations of the body".
Bonnefont
The four walkways of the Bonnefont surround a medieval herb garden. They are built from a number of elements from French monasteries, in large part from a late 12th century Cistercian abbey at Bonnefont-en-Comminges, southwest of Toulouse. The abbey was intact until at least 1807, when it was documented. By the 1850s, all of its architectural features had been removed from the site, often to decorating public and private buildings in the surrounding area. Today the cloisters contain twenty-one double capitals, surrounding a garden that contains many typical features of the medieval period, including a central wellhead, raised flower beds and lined with wattle fences. The marbles are highly ornate and decorated; some contain two registers, some with grotesque figures.
The stonework was acquired by Barnard in 1937. The garden contains a medlar tree such as that found in The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, and is centered around a wellhead in use since the 12th century. The entrance to the tapestries room is via a limestone portal from the Chateau de la Roche-Gencay Pitio, France, of c. 1520-30. It was acquired by Bernard along with "one hundred Gothic objects", financed by Rockefeller.
Trie
The Trie cloisters were built for the convent for Carmelite nuns at Trie-sur-Baïse, in south-western France. The original abbey, except for the church, was destroyed by Huguenots in 1571. A number of small narrow buttresses were added by the curator Joseph Breck, who based the design on features at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, England. Like those from Saint-Guilhem, the Trie cloisters have been given modern roofing.
The convent was built with 81 white marble capitals, carved between 1484â€"1490. Eighteen are now at the Cloisters, and contain numerous biblical scenes and incidents form the lives of saints. There is evidence of secularization in some of the carvings, including legendary figures such as Saint George and the Dragon. Other examples include a "wild man" confronting a grotesque monster, and a droll head wearing an unusual and fanciful hat. The capitals are placed in chronological order, beginning with God in the act of creation at the north west corner, Adam and Eve in the west gallery, followed by Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and Matthew and John writing their gospels. Capitals in the south gallery illustrate scenes from the life of Christ, from the Annunciation to his Entombment.
The Trie cloisters surround a rectangular garden which hosts around 80 species of plants, and contains a tall limestone cascade fountain at the center; it is a composite of two late 15th- to early 16th-century French structures.
Saint-Guilhem
The Saint-Guilhem cloisters originate from the site of the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert. The architectural elements date from 804 to the 1660s. From 1906, around 140 pieces were transferred to New York as one of Barnard's early acquisitions, including capitals, columns and pilasters.
The unusual and innovative carvings on the marble piers and column shafts recall Roman sculpture, and are coiled by extravagant foliage, including vines. The capitals contain acanthus leaves and grotesque heads peering out, including representations of the Presentation at the Temple, Daniel in the Lions' Den, and the Mouth of Hell, and a number of pilasters and columns. The carvings seem preoccupied with the evils of hell. Those beside the mouth of hell contain representations of the devil, tormenting beasts, with, according to art historian Bonnie Young, "animal-like body parts and cloven hoofs [as they] herd naked sinners in chains to be thrown into an upturned monster's mouth".
The Guilhem cloisters are located in an indoor section of the museum, and are smaller than their original incarnation. The area is covered by a skylight and plate glass panels which conserves heat in the winter months. The garden contains a central fountain, and its plant are potted in containers which include a 15th-century glazed earthenware vase.
Chapels and halls
Gothic Chapel
The Gothic chapel faces northeast and consists of two stories lit by stained glass in double-lancet windows, primarily a lancet window carved on both sides, which originates from the church of La Tricherie, between Tours and Poitiers, France. The window is positioned at the south end of the Early Gothic Hall, looking into the Gothic Chapel. It is entered at ground level via a large abbey door at its east wall. The hall begins with a pointed Gothic arch, leading to high bayed ceilings, ribbed vaults and buttress on the exterior. The apse contains a large limestone sculpture of Saint Margaret dated to c. 1330 and from Lleida, Spain. The glass windows are of the 14th century with a depiction of Saint Martin of Tours and complex medallion patterns; the three center windows are from the church of Sankt Leonhard, in southern Austria, from c. 1340. The glass on the east wall comes from Evron Abbey, Normandy, and dates from around 1325.
The Gothic chapel contains four effigies, each a supreme example of sepulchral art. Three of the tombs are from the Bellpuig de las Avellanes monastery, in northern Spain. The effigy of a young boy is from the church of Santa Maria at Castelló de Farfanya (Lleida, Spain). They were built for counts, their wives and children, each with a commemorative tombstone sculptural effigy. The family is associated with the church of Santa Maria at Castello de Farfanya, which was redesigned in the Gothic style for Ermengol X, Count of Urgell, who was dead by 1314.
The sepulchral monument is thought to contain Ermengol VI (d. 1184). It is supported by three stone lions, with a group of mourners carved into the effigy slab. The panels below him show Christ in Majesty, flanked by the Twelve Apostles. The female effigy was sourced in Normandy, dates to the mid 13th century, and is perhaps of Margaret of Gloucester. Although resting on a modern base, she is dressed in the height of contemporary aristocratic fashion, including a cotte, jewel studded belt and mantle, and an elaborate ring necklace brooch.
The exterior was heavily reworked between 1932â€"33 by Joseph Breck and Harold B. Willis. Keen to achieve both architectural harmony and preserve the proportions of the original building, they heightened the chapel, enlarged the windows, and added side windows to the bay by the apse.
Fuentidueña Chapel
The Fuentidueña hall is the museum's largest room. It opens with oak doors flanked by sculptures of leaping animals. It is built around the Fuentidueña Apse, a semicircular Romanesque apse dated c. 1175â€"1200, from the San MartÃn church at Fuentidueña, Segovia. The room contains a hanging crucifix and frescos honoring the Virgin Mary. The chapel consists of a rectangular courtyard with covered walk ways, and beds of flowering shrubs and plants.
The apse comprises over 3,300 individual stone blocks, mostly sandstone and limestone, shipped to New York in 839 individual crates. It was such a major and large installation into the Cloisters that it necessitated the demolition of the former "Special Exhibition Room". It was opened to the public in 1961, seven years after the transfer, its re-instillation was a major and highly innovative undertaking.
The capitals contain representations of the Adoration of the Magi and Daniel in the lions' den. Its piers show Martin of Tours on the left, and the angel Gabriel announcing to The Virgin on the right. The Fuentidueña room includes a number of other, mostly contemporary medieval art works set within the Fuentidueña Apse. They include, in its dome, a large fresco dating to between 1130â€"50, from the Spanish Church of Sant Joan de Tredòs, in its colorisation resembling a Byzantine mosaic and is dedicated to the ideal of Mary as the mother of God. Hanging within the apse is a c. 1150â€"1200 crucifix from the convent of St. Clara at Astudillo.
By the 19th century the Saint Joan Church was long abandoned and in disrepair. The apse was moved and reconstructed at the Cloisters in the late 1940s, a process that involved the shipping of almost 300 blocks of stone from Spain to New York. The acquisition followed three decades of complex negotiation and diplomacy between the Spanish church and both countries art historical hierarchies and governments. It was eventually exchanged in a deal that involved the transfer of six frescoes from San Baudelio de Berlanga to the Prado, on an equally long term loan.
Langon Chapel
The Lagon Chapel is entered from the Romanesque hall via the doorway from Moutiers-Saint-Jean, a large, elaborate Gothic stone entrance of French design which is centered by an oak door, and was sourced from Moutiers-Saint-Jean Abbey in Burgundy, France. Carvings on the elaborate white oolitic limestone doorway depict the Coronation of the Virgin, and contains foliated capitals, statuettes on the outer piers, two kings positioned in the embrasures, and various kneeling angels. Carvings of angels hover in the archivolts above the kings.
The Cathédrale Notre-Dame-du-Bourg de Digne dates from c. 1126. The Pontault Chapter house consists of a single aisle nave, projecting transepts is taken from a small parish Benedictine church of c. 1115 from Notre Dame de Pontaut, then in neglect and disrepair. When acquired, its upper level was a storage place for tobacco. About three quarters of its original stonework was relocated to New York. Moutiers-Saint-Jean was sacked, burned and rebuilt a number of times; in 1567 the Huguenot army cut off the heads the two kings.
In 1797 the abbey was sold as rubble for rebuilding. It lay in ruin for decades, with the sculpture severely defaced, before the door's transfer to New York, where it is now situated between the Romanesque Hall and the Langon Chapel. The doorway was the main portal of the abbey, was probably built as the south transept door, facing the cloister. The sculptured forms of the donors flanking either side of the doorway, probably represent the early Frankish kings Clovis I (d. 511), who converted to Christianity c 496, and his son Chlothar I (d. 561). The piers are lined with elaborate and highly detailed rows of statuettes, which are mostly set in niches, and baldly damaged; most have been decapitated.
The heads on the right hand capital were for a time believed to represent Henry II of England. Seven capitals survive from the original church, with carvings of human heads or figures, some now conformed as identifiable as historical persons, including of Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Romanesque hall
The Romanesque hall contains three great church doorways. The monumental arched Burgundian entrance is from Moutier-Saint-Jean de Réôme, France, and dated to c. 1150. Two animals are carved into the keystones, both on their hind legs as if about to attack each other. The capitals are lined with carvings of both real and imagined animals and birds, as well as leaves and other fauna. The two other, earlier doorways are from Reugny, Allier and Poitou in central France. The hall contains four large early 13th-century stone sculptures representing the Adoration of the Magi, and frescoes of a lion and a wyvern, each from the Monastery of San Pedro de Arlanza in north central Spain. On the left of the room are portraits of kings and angels, also from the monastery at Moutier-Saint-Jean.
The hall contains the remnants of a church at the Augustinian church at Reugny, consisting of three pairs of columns over a door with molded archivolts. The site was badly damage during the French Wars of Religion and again during the French Revolution. By 1850, most of the structures were sold to Piere-Yon Verniere, and acquired by Barnard in 1906.
Collection
Objects
The Cloisters holds approximately five thousand individual pieces of art, mostly from the 12th to 15th centuries, and all strictly limited to medieval European works. It holds several ivory c. 1300 Gothic Madonna ivory statuettes, mostly French, with some English examples. Other works include the Flemish tapestries The Hunt of the Unicorn (a series of seven tapestries probably woven in Brussels or Liège c. 1495â€"1505), the Nine Heroes tapestries, and the 12th-century ivory Cloisters Cross.
The museum's most well known panel painting is Robert Campin's important c. 1425â€"28 Mérode Altarpiece, a foundational work in the development of Early Netherlandish painting, which has been in the collection since 1956. It is well preserved, with little over-paint, glossing, dirt layers or paint loss. Other paintings include the Jumieges panels by an unknown French master, and a Nativity triptych altarpiece by a follower of Rogier van der Weyden.
The museum has an extensive collection of ceilings, frescoes, stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, porcelain statuettes, reliquary wood and metal shrines and crosses, as well as examples of the very rare Gothic boxwood miniature sculpture type. It holds liturgical vessels, and rare pieces of Gothic furniture and metalwork. Many pieces are not associated with a particular architectural setting, so their placement in the museum may vary.
Some of the objects have storied provenance, including those plundered from the estates of aristocrats in the years of the French Revolutionary Army's occupation of the Southern Netherlands. The Hunt of the Unicorn was for a period used by the French army to cloak potatoes and keep them from freezing over. It was purchased by Rockefeller in 1922, and six of the tapestries hung in his New York home until they were donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1938.
Stained glass
The Cloisters' collection of stained glass includes almost three hundred panels, mostly French and Germanic, mostly from the 3rd to early 16th centuries. A number were formed from hand made opalescent glass. The works in the collection are characterized by vivid colors and often abstract designs and patterns; many have a devotional image as a center piece. The collections' pot-metal works (i.e. containing colorants) from the High Gothic period highlight the effects of light, especially the transitions between darkness, shadow and illumination. The Met's collection grew in the early 20th century when Raymond Picairn acquired at a time when medieval glass was not highly sought by connoisseurs. Glass panels were difficult to extract and transport.
Jane Hayward, a curator at the museum from 1969, believed stained glass was "unquestioningly the preeminent form of Gothic medieval monumental painting", and began its second phase of acquisition. She bought c. 1500 heraldic windows from the Rhineland, now in the Campin room with the Mérode Altarpiece, acquired in 1950. Hayward's 1980 addition led to a redesign of the room so that the installed pieces would echo the domestic setting of the altarpiece. She wrote that the Campin room is the only gallery in the Met "where domestic rather than religious art predominates, [because] a conscious effort has been made to create fifteenth-century domestic interior similar to the one shown in [Campin]'s Annunciation panel."
Other acquisitions from this time include c. 1265 grisaille panels from the Château-de-Bouvreuil in Rouen, the Cathedral of Saint-Gervais-et-Saint-Protais at Sées, and panels from the Acezat collection, now in the Heroes Tapestry Hall.
Illuminated manuscripts
The museum has collected four medieval illuminated books; the French "Cloisters Apocalypse" (c. 1330), the "Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux" (c. 1325â€"28), the "Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg" and the renowned medieval illuminated manuscript, the Limbourg brothers' "Belles Heures du Duc de Berry" (c. 1399â€"1416). The four books are of exceptional rarity and quality. Their acquisition was a significant achievement for the museum's early collectorsâ€"but the consensus among the ruling hierarchy was that the Cloisters should focus on architectural elements, sculpture and decorative arts, which would enhance the environmental quality of the institution. Manuscripts were considered more suited to the Morgan Library in lower Manhattan. The "Belles Heures" is one of the finest surviving examples of manuscript illumination, and the only complete book from the hand of the Limbourgs. In 1954 it was purchased by J.D. Rockefeller Jr. from Maurice Rothschild, with the intention that it be given to the Metropolitan.
Library and archives
The Cloisters contains one of the Metropolitan Museum's thirteen libraries. Focusing on medieval art and architecture, it holds over 15,000 volumes of books and journals, the museum's archive administration papers, curatorial papers, dealer records, and the personal papers of Barnard, as well as early glass lantern slides of museum materials, manuscript facsimiles, scholarly records, maps and recordings of musical performances at the museum. The library functions primarily as a resource for museum staff, but is available, by appointment, to other researchers, academics and students.
Visual artifacts include early sketches and blueprints made during the early designs phase of the museum's build, as well as historical photographic collections. These include photographs of medieval objects from the collection of George Joseph Demotte, and a series taken during and just after World War II showing damage sustained to monuments and artifacts, including tomb effigies. They are, according to curator Lauren Jackson-Beck, of "prime importance to the art historian who is concerned with the identification of both the original work and later areas of reconstruction". Two major important series are kept on microfilm; the "Index photographique de l'art en France", and the German "Marburg Picture Index".
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
- Official website
- Curatorial department
- Cloisters digital collections
