18/2/13 - Day 6 Metropolitan Museum of Art

Beautiful day but crispy! Did the torture routine at the gym (why does it never seem to get easier?) and then dropped up to the Met to do the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance.

The bulk of the Met’s collection of Middle Ages Art is housed in the Cloisters up in Fort Tyron Park at the very northern tip of Manhattan and a later blog posting will no doubt cover this amazing place, but in the meanwhile I thought I would have a look at what the Met’s main building had to offer, just to wet my appetite.

As most of us know the church was a powerful force in the Middle Ages and religious art celebrated the place of the church in people’s lives. It was also used, a cynic might say, to instil fear in the poor and to ensure that the rich ‘did enough to get into heaven’ or at least enough to avoid being sent to Hell! Religious paintings and sculptures made Bible stories accessible to a mostly illiterate population and were often used to draw the faithful to embark upon a pilgrimage to view the miracles that were depicted – a bit like modern day tourist attractions!

A good example of this in the Met’s collection is a stunning monstrance allegedly containing ‘the tooth’ of Mary Magdalene and a silver reliquary cast from Saint Yrieix’s head that contained his skull (it even had a little metal grill on the top where you can look in and see the holy relic).

The journey to knighthood was a significant one for boys at the time and lessons were dedicated to inform a squire on the techniques of courtly love. I attach a photo of a ceremonial saddle with ‘bone’ carvings that would have been of significant interest to any teenage boy. Please look where the knight has his hands!  

The Met has some amazing stuff, like a statute of a youth that was sculpted by Michelangelo when he was just a teenager in Florence. This piece stood as part of a water feature in the garden at the Whitney family home on 5^th Avenue in the early 1900s before being donated to the museum.

In the 1560s Francesco de Medici established a ceramic workshop in Florence where Florentine craftsmen learned, over a period of some ten years, to imitate the expensive and fragile soft paste blue and white porcelain of China. There are only fifty nine pieces of this famous ‘Medici porcelain’ still in existence today, and the Met has six of them on display. Amazing craftsmanship!

And then there was the ‘Farnese’ table. This marble and alabaster table from the Farnese Palace in Rome was made in the 1560s and is inlaid with hundreds of semi-precious stones. It would have taken pride of place in the dining hall.

 

 

 

The next feature room I visited contained a reconstruction of the Chapel of the Chateau de la Bastie d’Urfe near Lyon. The walnut frames made around 1548 with inlaid exotic woods were truly exquisite.

The room also contains several stained glass windows from a Benedictine priory in Lorraine by Valentin Bousch (circa 1540). These windows are innovative because Bousch rejected the practice of compartmentalising the frames to tell the story but instead used the window as one canvas and dramatically increased the scale and impact that such artistry could convey.   

And to finish today’s adventure – I went to ‘the Venetian room’. This room was the first ever installed in the Met and has remained a popular attraction ever since because it gives the viewer a sense of what is must have been like to have been a successful trader in Venice at a time when all roads lead to this amazing city.