The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (Illustration)

The Fantastic True History of Unicorns

Unicorns are magical creatures that appear in just about every fantasy novel, and several fairy tales in recorded history. These stories have even appeared all over the world. According to legend, unicorns could only be tamed by a maiden with a pure heart. Their horns had the ability to purify liquid, and in some legends, their horns could heal wounds. This legend was enough to inspire people to hunt for this elusive creature for centuries. Even well-educated members of royalty purchased what they believed were unicorn horns, and scientists have treated the possibility of their existence very seriously in the past. But did this animal ever really exist? Was it hunted out of existence like the Dodo bird, or was it truly a figment of someone&rsquos imagination?

From a tapestry called &ldquoThe Lady and the Unicorn&rdquo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

What We Aren’t Seeing

How appropriate that a museum show devoted to the unicorn—a mythical animal whose name has come to mean something so rare and elusive that it might or might not exist—should have failed to materialize. “A Blessing of Unicorns” was slated to bring the fifteenth-century unicorn tapestries from the Musée de Cluny in Paris together with their counterparts in the Cloisters at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, as part of a celebration honoring the Met’s one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. Scheduled for 2020, the show was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. An exhibit of medieval art fell victim to plague, that most medieval of dangers.

The Met’s beautifully illustrated Summer 2020 bulletin, A Blessing of Unicorns: The Paris and Cloisters Tapestries, not only shows us what we missed but may make us rethink our view of unicorns—a subject that, to be honest, hadn’t crossed my mind in years. I used to think about unicorns a lot. In fact I lived with one, you could say: a reproduction of The Unicorn Rests in a Garden hung in my childhood bedroom. I used to stare at the dark fields so thickly covered with impossibly perfect flowers, and at the unicorn in its small round enclosure, so sweet, so melancholy, so lonely—so like the spirit of a preteen girl infused into the body of a white horse with a single corkscrew horn.

It came as something of a shock to see it again, as I looked through the Met minicatalogue and read the lucid informative essay by Barbara Drake Boehm, the senior curator at the Cloisters. And as I read, I saw something in the image I had never seen before. How could I not have noticed that the unicorn’s hide is streaked with blood, that thin rivulets of crimson trickle down the smooth white flesh as it rests so patiently in its circular enclosure? Some scholars have argued that the red streaks are pomegranate juice, the symbol of fertility, but it looks like blood to me, and it seems unlikely that the dog nibbling the unicorn’s back in The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden is dribbling red fruit nectar.

What would I have thought, as a child, if I’d known that this delicate, graceful creature was an animal to be hunted, like one of the endangered-species safari trophies so proudly displayed by Don Junior and Eric Trump? And what would I have concluded if I’d been told that this slaughter could not be accomplished without the willing assistance of an agreeable virgin?

Apparently, the unicorn was not only swift but strong, capable of killing an elephant with its horn. The hunters could not get near it on their own. That was why you needed the virgin. The unicorn liked to lay its head in a virgin’s lap, and, while it was distracted, the hunters closed in. The virgin was bait. In case the implications escape us and we miss the ramifications—the preciousness of female purity and the relative contamination of female sexuality—here is Richard de Fournival, the thirteenth-century chancellor of the Cathedral of Amiens and author of The Bestiary of Love:

I was captured also by smell … like the Unicorn which falls asleep in the sweet smell of maidenhood … no one dares to attack or ambush it except a young virgin. For when the unicorn senses a virgin by her smell, it kneels in front of her and gently humbles itself to be of service. Consequently, the clever hunters who know its nature place a maiden in its path, and it falls asleep in her lap. And then, when it is asleep the hunters, who have not the courage to pursue it while awake, come out and kill it.

When I stared at the picture, as a girl, was I being subliminally programmed for a future in which I would have to choose between the unicorn-friend and a sex life? What if we pretended to be virgins? The unicorn would smell it. And if we were virgins, what would be in it for us, delivering the lovely beast to its killers? By high school, my friends and I had begun to see virginity as a burden we were eager to be rid of we were too innocent to understand how much about girlhood—its energy and spirit—was a pity to lose. And certainly I was too young to consider how the cult of the virgin—the fetishization of virginity—was a bad thing for women, freighted with punishments imposed by men, intended not for the protection of girls but primarily as a guarantee about the product that one was buying, selling, or bartering in marriage.

Much has been made of the unicorn as a symbol of Christ, a reading of these images that a medievalist friend supports because of predestination, she says, the convoluted illogic of the Virgin being complicit in the murder of her son is beside the point. The unicorn’s wounds are the wounds of Jesus. Boehm is less convinced, and argues that the symbolic religious interpretation has been taken to extremes. But whether or not the unicorn represents (or reminds us of) Jesus, whether its blood is the blood of Christ, there’s no doubt that the hunters in the Cluny tapestries—coarse, rapacious, brutish, nasty—are dead ringers for the louts mocking Christ in the paintings of Bosch and Grunewald.

Though I could not help but mourn for my innocence lost, my preteen love of unicorns deflowered, I was grateful for the delightful unicorn factoids Boehm provides: The twelfth-century mystic and composer Hildegard von Bingen believed that you could cure leprosy by mashing a unicorn liver with an egg yolk. Cesare Borgia dressed up as unicorn for his wedding in 1498. Julius Caesar wrote that the unicorns lived in the forests of Germany, while later German pilgrims spotted a unicorn in the vicinity of Mount Sinai.

Woven around 1500, each of the Cluny tapestries represents one of the senses (taste, smell, sight, et cetera) and depicts a relatively static scene (unicorn, lady) against a red background heavily stippled with small animals, tress, banners, and flowers. It’s astonishing that these enormous, highly detailed works of representative art were woven, though my amazement was somewhat muted by not seeing them in person.

The tapestries at the Cloisters are not only later (dating from around the beginning of the sixteenth century) but far more dynamic, realistic—and bloodier.

The Hunters Enter the Woods, from the Hunt for the Unicorn Tapestries, 1495–1505.

The name of the series, “The Unicorn Hunt,” is an instant tip off : this is not My Little Pony. And yet, in the first of the series, The Hunters Enter the Woods, things look amiable enough. The dogs don’t seem all that bloodthirsty two of them look backward instead of ahead. The men wear funny hats, some with large plumes, and maybe those spears are just accessories that thirteenth-century men took on walks in the woods. Walking sticks with points.

The Unicorn Surrenders to the Maiden, from the Hunt for the Unicorn Tapestries, 1495–1505.

A crowd has gathered in The Unicorn Purifies Water, and it’s all very Peaceable Kingdom the unicorn is surrounded by a pack of real and mythical beasts, unsettling but unthreatening. The Unicorn Surrenders to the Maiden features only two humans—the (presumable) virgin and a hunter spying from the trees and blowing his horn, signaling the others. But now the dogs are worked up. One of them is either nuzzling or biting the unicorn, which remains calm, though now two streams of blood trickle down its back. The blood is as pretty—as aesthetic—as everything else.

The Unicorn Defends Himself, from the Hunt for the Unicorn Tapestries, 1495–1505.

It’s not until The Unicorn Defends Himself that the spears are raised. The dogs have gotten meaner, perhaps because one of them has been gored by the unicorn, whose blood has begun to flow.

The Hunters Return to the Castle, from the Hunt for the Unicorn Tapestries, 1495–1505.

The Hunters Return to the Castle is one of those medieval/Renaissance images that function like a film, showing us scenes that we can follow, sequentially, from one side of the image to the other. On the upper left, the unicorn is in agony, deeply pierced by three spears and beset by the dogs. And in the lower foreground, the dead unicorn—looking more like a slaughtered goat than a magical creature, its deflated carcass slung over the back of a handsome brown horse—has been brought for the approval of the regal lord and lady and their courtiers.

When I was in high school, often, in nice weather, my friends and I took the Fifth Avenue bus to the end of the line, Fort Tryon Park. We’d spend whole afternoons at the Cloisters. It was our European vacation, our cheaply available time travel. I don’t know how much time I spent in front of the unicorn tapestries, but I do know that, through all those hours, it never once occurred to me that I was looking at carnage.

Perhaps the cruelty and bloody-mindedness of this year has brought carnage into sharper focus. It’s unnerving, even embarrassing, but I always (or almost always) like having my eyes opened to something I didn’t notice, even though it was right in front of me all along. It wasn’t as if it had never occurred to me, how severely our society has been poisoned and deformed by racism and income inequality. But the events of this summer, the Black Lives Matter protests and the horrifying statistics that reveal how much more severely the poor and people of color have suffered from the pandemic have made it impossible not to see the blood. I used to say that our democracy was a fragile institution, that what happened to turn other democracies into dictatorships could easily happen here. But I don’t think I really believed it until recently.

However startling or painful the truth may be, seeing what we failed to notice feels like a continuing education, a lesson, even a gift. Like so many stories I thought I knew, like so many of the stories we tell ourselves and are told, the story of the unicorn is not what I’d thought. The beauty of these tapestries is thrilling, even in reproduction, but they do raise the question of how easily we can overlook the obvious, if we don’t look closely.

Francine Prose is the author of nineteen novels, eight works of nonfiction, three short-story collections, and one children’s book. Her most recent novel is Mister Monkey.

The Secret History of Weeds

‘What is a weed?’ Ralph Waldo Emerson asked the crowd that had gathered to hear him speak at Boston’s Old South Church on 30 March 1878. His answer: a plant not yet useful. There were some 200,000 weeds, he noted in his lecture, ‘Fortune of the Republic’, adding: ‘Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in Nature, but a mind is born to seek and find it […] The infinite applicability of these things in the hands of thinking man, every new application being equivalent to a new material.’ He was referring to capitalism and control and dominating the land. His story is that of a man, of a white man, of a ‘thinking man’.

My weeds are not Emerson’s weeds. The ones I see hold stories of globalization and mass migrations. Most of the weeds in the US are here because someone once thought they were useful. The language around them today is problematic: ‘native’, ‘invasive’, ‘alien’ – as if a microcosm of our politics. I look at my scraggly lawn and it’s all weeds. There’s chamomile and oxeye daisy, which has been called a ‘dangerous ornamental’ by the National Park Service and tastes like rocket in salad yarrow that Achilles carried to staunch his troops’ wounds prunella, known as ‘self-heal’ or ‘heal-all’ for its medicinal properties red clover that can be used as animal feed or to moderate women’s hormones. There are docks and plantain.

Deborah Pierce Bonnell, Queen Anne’s Lace, 2014. Courtesy: the artist

These plants and their histories are not simple. They were often brought by white colonizers. Plantain is also called ‘white man’s foot’ because it travelled everywhere white people went. Its young leaves make salad greens rich in nutrients and as a salve – even chewed up in saliva – work as a great healer of cuts.

Other weeds hold secrets of resistance. Queen Anne’s lace, with its bobbing white heads, is a wild carrot. The root is edible, but its seeds are another story – or, rather, they are my story. They are a progesterone inhibitor and can work like the morning-after pill or, taken daily, as the contraceptive pill. Mugwort’s long fronds wave at the cars that race past it on roadsides. Its leaves, with their silvery undersides, smell of pine and sage. They are a potent source of thujone, a natural compound with psychotropic qualities. Rumoured to be the reason witches fly, the plant sparks vivid, racing dreams. It also modulates women’s hormones and can induce abortion. Its roots are a rhizome, spreading exponentially. Seeing it in Brooklyn along the polluted Gowanus Canal, I think of the women who must have brought it here with them and imagine their needs, fears and dreams.

Mugwort, with its muddy-sounding name (‘wort’ means root), is the beginning of the ‘Nine Herbs Charm’. Published in the Lacnunga, a book of herbal remedies from the late 10th or early 11th century, the spell invokes the plant as if it’s alive and present:

you mighty against poison

You mighty against the evil

that fares through the land

The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, from ‘Unicorn Tapestries’, 1495–1505. Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

After I read the charm, mugwort – the ‘first’ and ‘oldest’ – became a sign of rebellion to me. Donald Trump was president then and challenging women’s reproductive rights I wanted this plant everywhere, along roads and in cyclone fencing, in parking lots and poor soils. As I ran through Prospect Park in the morning, I’d salute it. I see its fronds in summer and think of the lost histories of women. The first time I took it, in 2018, I followed directions a gardener at The Met Cloisters museum in Manhattan had given the artist Marlene McCarty. I had dreams of
packing a child’s red backpack emblazoned with cartoon characters and fleeing in a forced migration – an apt vision it seems, looking back.

When the charm was committed to writing, it was one of the last holdouts against Christianity. Four centuries later, vast numbers of women would be persecuted as witches for their herbal knowledge and, as farming developed into monocultures – with crops set out in rows and lines like single-point perspective – land itself became men’s wealth and inheritance. Then came colonization, capitalism, slavery and the stripping of women’s power over their lives and bodies. Medicine became man’s domain, too. In the US, white settlers – with the government’s sanction – stole land from and killed Native Americans because they wanted ever more territory to plant their waves of grain and cotton.

Emerson delivered his speech near the start of the Long Depression (1873–96), and he was addressing the economics of cotton and the Civil War in an argument I don’t fully understand. That depression sparked a counter-narrative to farming and capitalism. The year Emerson spoke, Black and white sharecroppers growing cotton in the South were aligning – not the story we often hear of the post-Reconstruction era – and their joint power terrified white supremacists. These farmers were being screwed over by capitalism, by merchants and banks and cotton brokers. Forming the Farmers’ Alliance in 1877, they raised class consciousness across racial lines. The group fought for unions, co-ops and socialist reforms of banking and railways. Cotton itself has been a tool of resistance, too: enslaved women carried knowledge of the plant from Africa where it also grows. Cotton, or gossypium as the genus is called, has abortifacient properties and, I’ve read, can suppress sperm.

Illustration from B.D. Basu and K.R. Kritkar, Indian Medicinal Plants, vol. 3, 1918. Courtesy: Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.

Reading the ‘Nine Herbs Charm’, I think about the ‘Unicorn Tapestries’ (1495–1505). One of my grad students, Kate Brock, is writing about them and points out the millefleurs technique, with flowers dotted everywhere, becoming the ground, the air, the aether. There is nothing between the plants and us. These tapestries were made around 500 years after the ‘Nine Herbs Charm’ was recorded, but the technique they employ is from the gothic era. Those plants and flowers suffuse everything human figures stand amidst them as if part of the foliage. In the later tapestries, Kate notes, the flowers are reduced and tamed. They become a line beneath the unicorn hunters’ feet. The plants and soil are now under our domain.

What is a weed? Mine are an economy of the waste places, prying through cracks in the pavements of toxic dump sites, parking lots and highway verges, where they can help remediate the soils. The US spends $20.5 billion annually on pesticides for monocultures to grow crops, spreading 23 million tonnes of fertilizer on high-yield varieties of corn, soybeans and wheat. Most fertilizer is nitrogen-based and requires methane to be produced. Methane is the main driver of climate change.

My weeds stand against that. They grow outside the rows, outside the lines, asserting other narratives. These plants no longer deemed useful, which capitalist farming sets out to destroy, can help reclaim those lost landscapes. Docks are rich in iron yarrow is anti-inflammatory and antiseptic. Plantain can phytoremediate some insecticides. Self-heal’s litany of beneficial properties include anti-ageing, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory. In the summer, I pick and eat its purple flowers as I walk through the grass that is not grass, but a weed, and that tells stories of my own resistance.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 218 with the headline ‘In the Weeds'.

_{Main image: The Unicorn Crosses a Stream, from ‘Unicorn Tapestries’, 1495–1505. Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York}

Join experts for an interdisciplinary, virtual exploration of The Met Cloisters' famous Unicorn Tapestries. Learn about the artistry and innovation behind the tapestries and consider the complex and enduring relationship between humanity and nature. The program includes practical curriculum connections for teaching and learning with science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM). For educators of all disciplines and grade levels.

Please note: This live event takes place on Zoom. Space is limited advance registration is required. Registration closes May 21, 2021, 5 pm (ET), or when registration is full.

Autogenerated captioning is available.

Image: The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries) (detail), 1495–1505. Made in Paris, France (cartoon) Made in Southern Netherlands (woven), Wool warp with wool, silk, silver, and gilt wefts, Overall: 144 7/8 x 99 in. (368 x 251.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr., 1937 (37.80.6)

What is a unicorn’s horn made of?

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge’s connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, U is for Unicorn. Despite being notoriously difficult to catch, they feature on maiolica plates, in 15th century heraldry, and in early recipes for anti-poison.

The 17th-century recipe for one anti-poison, ‘Banister’s Powder’, called for unicorn horn, ‘east bezoars’ and stags heart ‘bones’

Scroll to the end of the article to listen to the podcast.

At first glance, it might be a horse with wavy mane and swishing tail – but then you notice the long, twisted horn protruding from its forehead. Looking at this magnificent animal more closely, you see that its feet are most unlike horses’ hooves, cloven into digits almost like human feet.

No-one knows exactly what a unicorn looks like but the artist who decorated this maiolica plate (in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum: acc. no. C.86-1927) imagined a creature on a grand scale. The youthful rider, who sits astride a richly embroidered cloth, is dwarfed by the impressive size of his prancing steed.

The plate was originally part of a series, made in Italy in the early 16th century, depicting Caesar’s triumphal entry into Rome after the end of the second Punic War. The scene is taken from a set of woodcuts and the letter H marks its place in the narrative. The plates are thought to have been produced by a workshop in Cafaggiolo, not far from Florence.

The bold design is proof that unicorns have not always been the shy and gentle creatures that medieval bestiaries and 20 th -century children’s literature would have us believe. In fact, they were a ferocious addition to the ranks of mythical beasts in classical texts. Pliny the Elder described the unicorn thus:

“… a very fierce animal called the monoceros which has the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse it makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead.”

From these chimerical beginnings, the unicorn took a variety of directions in terms of both appearance and symbolism. It became an emblem for Christ in the Middle Ages and was often used in heraldry from the 15th century onwards. The lion and the unicorn are the symbols of the UK with the lion representing England and the unicorn Scotland.

The Fitzwilliam Museum collection abounds with unicorns. Some of the most beguiling appear in ‘books of hours’ and ‘bestiaries’. Freelance researcher, Robert Lloyd Parry, investigated just a few of them in the course of researching an exploration of signs and symbols in art for the Fitzwilliam’s website.

A Flemish Book of Hours, dating from 1526, shows the Annunciation. Mary sits in a walled garden (symbolic of her virginity) and a white unicorn rests its horn in her lap. God the Father peeps out of a burning bush behind her and, beyond the garden, Gabriel blows a hunting horn.

A 15th-century illuminated manuscript – a French translation of a 13th-century encyclopaedia – depicts a unicorn in the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man. Lloyd Parry writes: “God the Father holds the right hands of Adam and Eve with angels and animals looking on. A stream emerges from the ground at God’s feet. The unicorn’s horn points towards its clear waters – a reference perhaps to its legendary abilities to purify water.“

A magical creature is likely to have magical powers: unicorn horn is associated with purity. Natalie Lawrence, a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, is researching early encounters with exotic creatures – including the opportunities they presented for traders and apothecaries.

Lawrence’s work offers fresh insights into how protective and curative powers were attributed to natural substances, at a time when there was widespread fear of poisoning. The 17th-century recipe for one anti-poison, ‘Banister’s Powder’, called for unicorn horn, ‘east bezoars’ and stags heart ‘bones’. Members of the nobility purchased tableware and cups with ‘unicorn horn’ bases to avoid being poisoned, and the Throne Chair of Denmark (constructed 1662-1671) is even made of ‘unicorn horn’.

Powdered medicinal ‘unicorn horn’ was usually walrus ivory, rhinoceros horn or narwhal tusk, sometimes called ‘sea unicorn’. The problem of distinguishing ‘true horn’ was commented on by the French doctor, Pierre Martin La Martinière (1634-1690), who described the difficulty of knowing ‘what Creature the right Unicorn… there being several Animals the Greeks call Monoceros, and the Latines Uni-Cornis’, from a variety of terrestrial quadrupeds and ‘serpents’, to the ‘sea-elephant’ (walrus).

Materials such as walrus ivory, when identified as such, could possess similar qualities to unicorn’s horn. One apothecary, a ‘Mr Alexander Woodson of Bristoll’, ‘a skilful Phisition’, had ‘one of these beasts teeth, which ‘he had made tryall of’ by ‘ministering medicine to his patients, and had found it as soveraigne against poyson as any Unicornes horne’.

The implicit links between unicorns and these other beasts did not diminish horns’ perceived medical powers. The Danish scholar Ole Worm (1588-1655) debunked the existence of the terrestrial unicorn in a public lecture using the skull of a narwhal, but he still attested to the horn's medical potency. Worm described experiments where poisoned animals had been revived by administration of powdered ‘sea unicorn’ horn.

By the early 18th century, ‘unicorn horns’ were much less prized in collections, losing some of their status as ‘rarities’, as high-volume importation into Europe flooded the market. But the appeal of the unicorn itself, especially incarnations such as the fleet-of-foot and mercurial creature of CS Lewis’s Narnia books, has never waned.

Perhaps this is because, most famously, they have always been extremely hard to catch.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: V is for an animal that is responsible for up to 94,000 deaths a year, but is also being used to help develop treatments for diseases such as haemophilia, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, heart attack and stroke.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Detail from Salutations of the Virgin, from the Carew-Poyntz Book of Hours (Fitzwilliam Museum) Detail from Virgin reading in enclosed garden, Book of Hours, by Geert Grote (Fitzwilliam Museum) Unicorns from early modern natural histories by Topsell and Johnstone Illustration of a narwhal skull from Ole Worm's book.

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The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Formation Edit

The basis for the museum's architectural structure came from the collection of George Grey Barnard, an American sculptor and collector who almost single-handedly established a medieval art museum near his home in the Fort Washington section of Upper Manhattan. Although he was a successful sculptor who had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, his income was not enough to support his family. Barnard was a risk taker and led most of his life on the edge of poverty. [6] He moved to Paris in 1883 where he studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. [6] He lived in the village of Moret-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, between 1905 and 1913, [7] and began to deal in 13th- and 14th-century European objects to supplement his earnings. In the process he built a large personal collection of what he described as "antiques", at first by buying and selling stand-alone objects with French dealers, [8] then by the acquisition of in situ architectural artifacts from local farmers. [6]

Barnard was primarily interested in the abbeys and churches founded by monastic orders from the 12th century. Following centuries of pillage and destruction during wars and revolutions, stones from many of these buildings were reused by local populations. [6] A pioneer in seeing the value in such artifacts, Barnard often met with hostility to his effort from local and governmental groups. [7] Yet he was an astute negotiator who had the advantage of a professional sculptor's eye for superior stone carving, and by 1907 he had built a high-quality collection at relatively low cost. Reputedly he paid $25,000 for the Trie buildings, $25,000 for the Bonnefort and $100,000 for the Cuxa cloisters. [9] His success led him to adopt a somewhat romantic view of himself. He recalled bicycling across the French countryside and unearthing fallen and long-forgotten Gothic masterworks along the way. He claimed to have found the tomb effigy of Jean d'Alluye face down, in use as a bridge over a small stream. [8] By 1914 he had gathered enough artifacts to open a gallery in Manhattan. [10]

Barnard often neglected his personal finances, [9] and was so disorganized that he often misplaced the origin or provenance of his purchases. He sold his collection to John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1925 during one of his recurring monetary crises. [11] The two had been introduced by the architect William W. Bosworth. [12] Purchased for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the acquisition included structures that would become the foundation and core of the museum. [6] [7] Rockefeller and Barnard were polar opposites in both temperament and outlook and did not get along Rockefeller was reserved, Barnard exuberant. The English painter and art critic Roger Fry was then the Metropolitan's chief European acquisition agent and acted as an intermediary. [13] Rockefeller eventually acquired Barnard's collection for around $700,000, retaining Barnard as an advisor. [14]

In 1927 Rockefeller hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of one of the designers of Central Park, and the Olmsted Brothers firm to create a park in the Fort Washington area. [15] In February 1930 Rockefeller offered to build the Cloisters for the Metropolitan. [16] Under consultation with Bosworth, [7] he decided to build the museum at a 66.5-acre (26.9 ha) site at Fort Tryon Park, which they chose for its elevation, views, and accessible but isolated location. [10] The land and existing buildings were purchased that year from the C. K. G. Billings estate and other holdings in the Fort Washington area. The Cloisters building and adjacent 4-acre (1.6 ha) gardens were designed by Charles Collens. [17] They incorporate elements from abbeys in Catalonia and France. Parts from Sant Miquel de Cuixà, 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. Construction took place over a five-year period from 1934. [18] Rockefeller bought several hundred acres of the New Jersey Palisades, which he donated to the State in an effort to preserve the view from the museum. [19] The Cloisters' new building and gardens were officially opened on May 10, 1938, [20] though the public was not allowed to visit until four days later. [21]

Early acquisitions Edit

Rockefeller financed the purchase of many of the early collection of works, often buying independently and then donating the items to the museum. [5] His financing of the museum has led to it being described as "perhaps the supreme example of curatorial genius working in exquisite harmony with vast wealth". [6] The second major donor was the industrialist J. P. Morgan, founder of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, who spent the last 20 years of his life acquiring artworks, "on an imperial scale" according to art historian Jean Strous, [22] spending some $900 million (inflation adjusted) in total. After his death, his son J. P. Morgan Jr. donated a large number of works from the collection to the Metropolitan. [23]

A further major early source of objects was the art dealer Joseph Brummer (1883–1947), long a friend of a curator at the Cloisters, James Rorimer. Rorimer had long recognized the importance of Brummer's collection, and purchased large quantities of objects in the months after Brummer's sudden death in 1947. According to Christine E. Brennan of the Metropolitan, Rorimer realized that the collection offered works that could rival the Morgan Collection in the Metropolitan's Main Building, and that "the decision to form a treasury at The Cloisters was reached. because it had been the only opportunity since the late 1920s to enrich the collection with so many liturgical and secular objects of such high quality." [24] These pieces, including works in gold, silver, and ivory, are today held in the Treasury room of the Cloisters. [24]

The museum's collection of artworks consists of approximately five thousand individual pieces. They are displayed across a series of rooms and spaces, mostly separate from those dedicated to the installed architectural artifacts. The Cloisters has never focused on building a collection of masterpieces, rather the objects are chosen thematically yet arranged simply to enhance the atmosphere created by the architectural elements in the particular setting or room in which they are placed. [5] To create the atmosphere of a functioning series of cloisters, many of the individual works, including capitals, doorways, stained glass, and windows are placed within the architectural elements themselves. [25]

Panel paintings and sculpture Edit

The museum's best-known panel painting is Robert Campin's c. 1425–28 Mérode Altarpiece, a foundational work in the development of Early Netherlandish painting, [26] which has been at The Cloisters since 1956. Its acquisition was funded by Rockefeller and described at the time as a "major event for the history of collecting in the United States". [27] The triptych is well preserved with little overpainting, glossing, dirt layers or paint loss. [28] Other panel paintings in the collection include a Nativity triptych altarpiece attributed to a follower of Rogier van der Weyden, [29] and the Jumieges panels by an unknown French master. [30]

The 12th-century English walrus ivory Cloisters Cross contains over ninety-two intricately carved figures and ninety-eight inscriptions. A similar 12th-century French metalwork reliquary cross contains six sequences of engravings on either side of its shaft, and across the four sides of its lower arms. [31] Further pieces of note include a 13th-century, English Enthroned Virgin and Child statuette, [32] a c. 1490 German statue of Saint Barbara, [33] and an early 16th-century boxwood Miniature Altarpiece with the Crucifixion. [34] Other significant works include fountains and baptismal fonts, chairs, [35] aquamaniles (water containers in animal or human form), bronze lavers, alms boxes and playing cards. [36]

The museum has an extensive collection of medieval European frescoes, ivory statuettes, reliquary wood and metal shrines and crosses, as well as examples of the very rare Gothic boxwood miniatures. [37] It has liturgical metalwork vessels and rare pieces of Gothic furniture and metalwork. [38] Many pieces are not associated with a particular architectural setting, so their placement in the museum may vary. [39] Some of the objects have dramatic provenance, including those plundered from the estates of aristocrats during the French Revolutionary Army's occupation of the Southern Netherlands. [40] The Unicorn tapestries were for a period used by the French army to cover potatoes and keep them from freezing. [41] The set was purchased by Rockefeller in 1922 and six of the tapestries hung in his New York home until donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1938. [42]

Illuminated manuscripts Edit

The museum's collection of illuminated books is small, but of exceptional quality. J.P. Morgan was a major early donor, but although his taste leaned heavily towards rare printed and illuminated books, [43] he donated very few to the Metropolitan, instead preserving them at the Morgan Library. [23] At the same time, the consensus within the Met was that the Cloisters should focus on architectural elements, sculpture and decorative arts to enhance the environmental quality of the institution, whereas manuscripts were considered more suited to the Morgan Library in lower Manhattan. [44] The Cloisters' books are today displayed in the Treasury room, and include the French "Cloisters Apocalypse" (or "Book of Revelation", c. 1330, probably Normandy), [45] Jean Pucelle's "Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux" (c. 1324–28), the "Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg", attributed to Jean Le Noir and the "Belles Heures du Duc de Berry" (c. 1399–1416) attributed to the Limbourg brothers. [46] In 2015 the Cloisters acquired a small Netherlandish Book of Hours illuminated by Simon Bening. [47] Each is of exceptional quality, and their acquisition was a significant achievement for the museum's early collectors. [44]

A coat of arms illustrated on one of the leaves of the "Cloisters Apocalypse" suggests it was commissioned by a member of the de Montigny family of Coutances, Normandy. [48] Stylistically it resembles other Norman illuminated books, as well as some designs on stained glass, of the period. [49] The book was in Switzerland by 1368, possibly at the abbey of Zofingen, in the canton of Aargau. It was acquired by the Met in 1968. [50]

The "Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux" is a very small early Gothic book of hours containing 209 folios, of which 25 are full-page miniatures. It is lavishly decorated in grisaille drawings, historiated initials and almost 700 border images. Jeanne d'Évreux was the third wife of Charles IV of France, and after their deaths the book went into the possession of Charles' brother, Jean, duc de Berry. The use of grisaille (shades of gray) drawings allowed the artist to give the figures a highly sculptural form, [51] and the miniatures contain structures typical of French Gothic architecture of the period. The book has been described as "the high point of Parisian court painting", and evidence of "the unprecedentedly refined artistic tastes of the time". [52]

The "Belles Heures" is widely regarded as one of the finest extant examples of manuscript illumination, and very few books of hours are as richly decorated. It is the only surviving complete book attributed to the Limbourg brothers. [53] Rockefeller purchased the book from Maurice de Rothschild in 1954, and donated it to the Metropolitan. [54]

The very small "Bonne de Luxembourg" manuscript (each leaf 12.5 × 8.4 × 3.9 cm) is attributed to Jean le Noir, and noted for its preoccupation with death. It was commissioned for Bonne de Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy, daughter of John the Blind and the wife of John II of France, probably at the end of her husband's life, c. 1348–49. It was in a private collection for many years, and thus known only through poor-quality photographic reproductions until acquired by the museum in 1969. Produced in tempera, grisaille, ink, and gold leaf on vellum, it had been rarely studied and was until that point misattributed to Jean Pucelle. Following its acquisition, it was studied by art historians, after which attribution was given to Le Noir. [55]

Tapestries Edit

While examples of textile art are displayed throughout the museum, there are two dedicated rooms given to individual series of tapestries, the South Netherlandish Nine Heroes (c. 1385) [56] and FlemishThe Hunt of the Unicorn (c. 1500). [57] The Nine Heroes room is entered from the Cuxa cloisters. [56] Its 14th-century tapestries are one of the earliest surviving examples of tapestry, and are thought to be the original versions following widely influential and copied designs attributed to Nicolas Bataille. They were acquired over a period of twenty years, involving the purchase of more than 20 individual fragments which were then sewn together during a long reassembly process. The chivalric figures represent the scriptural and legendary Nine Worthies, who consist of three pagans (Hector, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar), three Jews (Joshua, David and Judas Maccabeus) and three Christians (King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon). Of these, five figures survive: Hector, Caesar, Joshua, David and Arthur. [58] They have been described as representing "in their variety, the highest level of a rich and powerful social structure of later fourteenth-century France". [59]

The Hunt of the Unicorn room can be entered from the hall containing the Nine Heroes via an early 16th-century door carved with representations of unicorns. [60] The unicorn tapestries consist of a series of large, colourful hangings and fragment textiles [61] designed in Paris [58] and woven in Brussels or Liège. Noted for their vivid colourization—dominated by blue, yellow-brown, red, and gold hues—and the abundance of a wide variety of flora, [62] they were produced for Anne of Brittany and completed c. 1495–1505. [63] The tapestries were purchased by Rockefeller in 1922 for about one million dollars, and donated to the museum in 1937. [64] They were cleaned and restored in 1998, and are now hung in a dedicated room on the museum's upper floor. [65]

The large "Nativity" panel (also known as "Christ is Born as Man's Redeemer") from c. 1500, South Netherlandish (probably in Brussels), Burgos Tapestry was acquired by the museum in 1938. It was originally one of a series of eight tapestries representing the salvation of man, [66] with individual scenes influenced by identifiable panel paintings, including by van der Weyden. [67] It was badly damaged in earlier centuries: it had been cut into several irregular pieces and undergone several poor-quality restorations. The panel underwent a long process of restoration from 1971, undertaken by Tina Kane and Alice Blohm of the Metropolitan's Department of Textile Conservation. It is today hung in the Late Gothic hall. [68]

Stained glass Edit

The Cloisters' collection of stained glass consists of around three hundred panels, generally French and Germanic and mostly from the 13th to early 16th centuries. [70] A number were formed from handmade opalescent glass. Works in the collection are characterized by vivid colors and often abstract designs and patterns many have a devotional image as a centerpiece. [71] The majority of these works are in the museum's Boppard room, named after the Carmelite church of Saint Severinus in Boppard, near Koblenz, Germany. [10] The collection's pot-metal works (from the High Gothic period) highlight the effects of light, [72] especially the transitions between darkness, shadow and illumination. [73] The Met's collection grew in the early 20th century when Raymond Picairn made acquisitions at a time when medieval glass was not highly regarded by connoisseurs, and was difficult to extract and transport. [74]

Jane Hayward, a curator at the museum from 1969 who began the museum's second phase of acquisition, describes stained glass as "unquestioningly the preeminent form of Gothic medieval monumental painting". [75] She bought c. 1500 heraldic windows from the Rhineland, now in the Campin room with the Mérode Altarpiece. Hayward's addition in 1980 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. a conscious effort has been made to create a fifteenth-century domestic interior similar to the one shown in [Campin's] Annunciation panel." [76]

Other significant acquisitions include late 13th-century grisaille panels from the Château-de-Bouvreuil in Rouen, glass work from the Cathedral of Saint-Gervais-et-Saint-Protais at Sées, [76] and panels from the Acezat collection, now in the Heroes Tapestry Hall. [77]

The building is set into a steep hill, and thus the rooms and halls are divided between an upper entrance and a ground-floor level. The enclosing exterior building is mostly modern, and 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 the architect Charles Collens, who took influence from works in Barnard's collection. Rockefeller closely managed both the building's design and construction, which sometimes frustrated the architects and builders. [78]

The building contains architecture elements and settings taken mostly from four French abbeys, which between 1934 and 1939 were transported, reconstructed, and integrated with new buildings in a project overseen by Collins. He told Rockefeller that the new building "should present a well-studied outline done in the very simplest form of stonework growing naturally out of the rocky hill-top. After looking through the books in the Boston Athenaeum . we found a building at Monsempron in Southern France of a type which would lend itself in a very satisfactory manner to such a treatment." [78]

The architects sought to both memorialize the north hill's role in the American Revolution and to provide a sweeping view over the Hudson River. Construction of the exterior began in 1935. The stonework, primarily of limestone and granite from several European sources, [79] includes four Gothic windows from the refectory at Sens and nine arcades. [80] The dome of the Fuentidueña Chapel was especially difficult to fit into the planned area. [81] The east elevation, mostly of limestone, contains nine arcades from the Benedictine priory at Froville and four flamboyant French Gothic windows from the Dominican monastery at Sens. [80]

Cloisters Edit

Cuxa Edit

Located on the south side of the building's main level, the Cuxa cloisters are the museum's centerpiece both structurally and thematically. [72] They were originally erected at the Benedictine Abbey of Sant Miquel de Cuixà on Mount Canigou, in the northeast French Pyrenees, which was founded in 878. [82] The monastery was abandoned in 1791 and fell into disrepair its roof collapsed in 1835 and its bell tower fell in 1839. [83] About half of its stonework was moved to New York between 1906 and 1907. [82] [84] The installation became one of the first major undertakings by the Metropolitan after it acquired Barnard's collection. After intensive work over the fall and winter of 1925–26, the Cuxa cloisters were opened to the public on April 1, 1926. [85] [5]

The quadrangle-shaped garden once formed a center around which monks slept in cells. The original garden seemed to have been lined by walkways around adjoining arches lined with capitals enclosing the garth. [86] It is impossible now to represent solely medieval species and arrangements those in the Cuxa garden are approximations by botanists specializing in medieval history. [86] The oldest plan of the original building describes lilies and roses. [86] Although the walls are modern, the capitals and columns are original and cut from pink Languedoc marble from the Pyrenees. [85] The intersection of the two walkways contains an eight-sided fountain. [87]

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, angels, and monstrous creatures including two-headed animals, lions restrained by apes, mythic hybrids, a mermaid and inhuman mouths consuming human torsos. [88] [89] The motifs are derived from popular fables, [82] or represent the brute forces of nature or evil, [90] or are based on late 11th- and 12th-century monastic writings, such as those by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). [91] 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. [92] 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". [93]

Saint-Guilhem Edit

The Saint-Guilhem cloisters were taken from the site of the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, and date from 804 AD to the 1660s. [94] Their acquisition around 1906 was one of Barnard's early purchases. The transfer to New York involved the movement of around 140 pieces, including capitals, columns and pilasters. [9] The carvings on the marble piers and column shafts recall Roman sculpture and are coiled by extravagant foliage, including vines. [95] The capitals contain acanthus leaves and grotesque heads peering out, [96] including figures at the Presentation at the Temple, Daniel in the Lions' Den [97] and the Mouth of Hell, [98] and several pilasters and columns. [94] The carvings seem preoccupied with the evils of hell. Those beside the mouth of hell contain representations of the devil and tormenting beasts, with, according to Young, "animal-like body parts and cloven hoofs [as they] herd naked sinners in chains to be thrown into an upturned monster's mouth". [99]

The Guilhem cloisters are inside the museum's upper level and are much smaller than originally built. [100] Its garden contains a central fountain [101] and plants potted in ornate containers, including a 15th-century glazed earthenware vase. The area is covered by a skylight and plate glass panels that conserve heat in the winter months. Rockefeller had initially wanted a high roof and clerestory windows, but was convinced by Joseph Breck, curator of decorative arts at the Metropolitan, to install a skylight. Breck wrote to Rockefeller that "by substituting a skylight for a solid ceiling . the sculpture is properly illuminated, since the light falls in a natural way the visitor has the sense of being in the open and his attention, consequently, is not attracted to the modern superstructure." [102]

Bonnefont Edit

The Bonnefont cloisters were assembled from several French monasteries, but mostly come from a late 12th-century Cistercian Abbaye de Bonnefont [fr] at Bonnefont-en-Comminges, southwest of Toulouse. [103] The abbey was intact until at least 1807, and by the 1850s all of its architectural features had been removed from the site, often for decoration of nearby buildings. [104] Barnard purchased the stonework in 1937. [105] Today the Bonnefont cloisters contain 21 double capitals, and surround a garden that contains many features typical of the medieval period, including a central wellhead, raised flower beds and lined with wattle fences. [106] The marbles are highly ornate and decorated, some with grotesque figures. [107] The inner garden has been set with a medlar tree of the type found in The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, and is centered around a wellhead placed at Bonnefont-en-Comminges in the 12th century. [108] The Bonnefont is on the upper level of the museum and gives a view of the Hudson River and the cliffs of the Palisades. [10]

Trie Edit

The Trie cloisters was compiled from two late 15th- to early 16th-century French structures. [110] Most of its components came from the Carmelite convent at Trie-sur-Baïse in south-western France, whose original abbey, except for the church, was destroyed by Huguenots in 1571. [111] Small narrow buttresses were added in New York during the 1950s by Breck. [81] The rectangular garden hosts around 80 species of plants and contains a tall limestone cascade fountain at its center. [112] Like those from Saint-Guilhem, the Trie cloisters have been given modern roofing. [113]

The convent at Trie-sur-Baïse featured some 80 white marble capitals [114] carved between 1484 and 1490. [110] Eighteen were moved to New York and contain numerous biblical scenes and incidents form the lives of saints. Several of the carvings are secular, including those of legendary figures such as Saint George and the Dragon, [114] the "wild man" confronting a grotesque monster, and a grotesque head wearing an unusual and fanciful hat. [114] The capitals are placed in chronological order, beginning with God in the act of creation at the northwest corner, Adam and Eve in the west gallery, followed by the Binding of Isaac, and Matthew and John writing their gospels. Capitals in the south gallery illustrate scenes from the life of Christ. [115]

Gardens Edit

The Cloisters' three gardens, the Judy Black Garden at the Cuxa Cloister on the main level, and the Bonnefont and Trie Cloisters gardens on the lower level, [116] were laid out and planted in 1938. They contain a variety of rare medieval species, [117] with a total of over 250 genera of plants, flowers, herbs and trees, making it one of the world's most important collections of specialized gardens. The garden's design was overseen by Rorimer during the museum's construction. He was aided by Margaret Freeman, who conducted extensive research into the keeping of plants and their symbolism in the Middle Ages. [118] Today the gardens are tended by a staff of horticulturalists the senior members are also historians of 13th- and 14th-century gardening techniques. [119]

Gothic chapel Edit

The Gothic chapel is set on the museum's ground level, and was built to display its stained glass and large sculpture collections. The entrance from the upper level Early Gothic Hall is lit by stained glass double-lancet windows, carved on both sides, and acquired from the church of La Tricherie, France. [120] The ground level is entered through a large door at its east wall. This entrance begins with a pointed Gothic arch leading to high bayed ceilings, ribbed vaults and buttress. [121] The three center windows are from the church of Sankt Leonhard, in southern Austria, from c. 1340. The glass panels include a depiction of Martin of Tours as well as complex medallion patterns. [121] The glass on the east wall comes from Evron Abbey, Normandy, and dates from around 1325. [122] The apse contains three large sculptures by the main windows two larger than life-size female saints dating from the 14th century, and a Burgundian Bishop dating from the 13th. [123] The large limestone sculpture of Saint Margaret on the wall by the stairs dates to around 1330 and is from the church of Santa Maria de Farfanya [ca] in Lleida, Catalonia. [121] Each of the six effigies are supreme examples of sepulchral art. [124] Three are from the Bellpuig Monastery [ca] in Catalonia. [124] The monument directly facing the main windows is the c. 1248–67 sarcophagus of Jean d'Alluye, a knight of the crusades, who was thought to have returned from the Holy Land with a relic of the True Cross. He is shown as a young man, his eyes open, and dressed in chain armor, with his longsword and shield. [123] The female effigy of a lady, found in Normandy, dates to the mid 13th century and is perhaps of Margaret of Gloucester. [125] Although resting on a modern base, [126] she is dressed in high contemporary aristocratic fashion, including a mantle, cotte, jewel-studded belt and an elaborate ring necklace brooch. [127]

Four of the effigies were made for the Urgell family, are set into the chapel walls, and are associated with the church of Santa Maria at Castello de Farfanya, redesigned in the Gothic style for Ermengol X (died c. 1314). [124] The elaborate sarcophagus of Ermengol VII, Count of Urgell (d. 1184) is placed on the left hand wall facing the chapel's south windows. It is supported by three stone lions, and a grouping of mourners carved into the slab, which also shows Christ in Majesty flanked by the Twelve Apostles. [128] The three other Urgell tombs also date to the mid 13th century, and maybe of Àlvar of Urgell and his second wife, Cecilia of Foix, the parents of Ermengol X, and that of a young boy, possibly Ermengol IX, the only one of their direct line ancestors known to have died in youth. [125] The slabs of the double tomb on the wall opposite Ermengol VII, contain the effigies of his parents, and have been slanted forward to offer a clear view of the stonework. The heads are placed on cushions, which are decorated with arms. The male's feet rest on a dog, while the cushion under the woman's head is held by an angel. [129]

Fuentidueña chapel Edit

The Fuentidueña chapel is the museum's largest room, [130] and is entered through a broad oak door flanked by sculptures that include leaping animals. Its centerpiece is the Fuentidueña Apse, a semicircular Romanesque recess built between about 1175 to 1200 at the Saint Joan church at Fuentidueña, Segovia. [131] By the 19th century, the church was long abandoned and in disrepair.

It was acquired by Rockefeller for the Cloisters in 1931, following 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. [33] The structure was disassembled into almost 3,300 mostly sandstone and limestone blocks, each individually cataloged, and shipped to New York in 839 crates. [132]

It was rebuilt at the Cloisters in the late 1940s [133] It was such a large and complex reconstruction that it required the demolition of the former "Special Exhibition Room". The chapel was opened to the public in 1961, seven years after its installation had begun. [134]

The apse consists of a broad arch leading to a barrel vault, and culminates with a half-dome. [135] The capitals at the entrance contain representations of the Adoration of the Magi and Daniel in the lions' den. [136] The piers show Martin of Tours on the left and the angel Gabriel announcing to The Virgin on the right. The chapel includes other, mostly contemporary, medieval artwork. They include, in the dome, a large fresco dating to between 1130–50, from the Spanish Church of Sant Joan de Tredòs. The fresco's colorization resembles a Byzantine mosaic and is dedicated to the ideal of Mary as the mother of God. [137] Hanging within the apse is a crucifix made between about 1150 to 1200 for the Convent of St. Clara [es] in Astudillo, Spain. [138] Its reverse contains a depiction of the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), decorated with red and blue foliage at its frames. [139] The exterior wall holds three small, narrow and stilted windows, [136] which are nevertheless designed to let in the maximum amount of light. The windows were originally set within imposing fortress walls according to the art historian Bonnie Young "these small windows and the massive, fortress-like walls contribute to the feeling of austerity . typical of Romanesque churches." [135]

Langon chapel Edit

The Langon chapel is on the museum's ground level. Its right wall was built around 1126 for the Romanesque Cathédrale Notre-Dame-du-Bourg de Digne. [140] The chapter house consists of a single aisle nave and transepts [141] taken from a small Benedictine parish church built around 1115 at Notre Dame de Pontaut. [142] When acquired, it was in disrepair, its upper level in use as a storage place for tobacco. About three-quarters of its original stonework was moved to New York. [141]

The chapel is entered from the Romanesque hall through a doorway, a large, elaborate French Gothic stone entrance commissioned by the Burgundian court [10] for Moutiers-Saint-Jean Abbey in Burgundy, France. Moutiers-Saint-Jean was sacked, burned, and rebuilt several times. In 1567, the Huguenot army removed the heads from the two kings, and in 1797 the abbey was sold as rubble for rebuilding. The site lay in ruin for decades and lost further sculptural elements until Barnard arranged for the entrances' transfer to New York. The doorway had been the main portal of the abbey, and was probably built as the south transept door.

Carvings on the elaborate white oolitic limestone doorway depict the Coronation of the Virgin and contains foliated capitals and statuettes on the outer piers including two kings positioned in the embrasures and various kneeling angels. Carvings of angels are placed in the archivolts above the kings. [143] The large figurative sculptures on either side of the doorway represent the early Frankish kings Clovis I (d. 511) and his son Chlothar I (d. 561). [144] [145] The piers are lined with elaborate and highly detailed rows of statuettes, which are mostly set in niches, [146] and are badly damaged most have been decapitated. The heads on the right hand capital were for a time believed to represent Henry II of England. [147] Seven capitals survive from the original church, with carvings of human figures or heads, some of which as have been identified as historical persons, including Eleanor of Aquitaine. [141]

Romanesque hall Edit

The Romanesque hall contains three large church doorways, with the main visitor entrance adjoining the Guilhem Cloister. The monumental arched Burgundian doorway is from Moutier-Saint-Jean de Réôme in France and dates to c. 1150. [10] Two animals are carved into the keystones both rest 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. [148] The two earlier doorways are from Reugny, Allier, and Poitou in central France. [4] The hall contains four large early-13th-century stone sculptures representing the Adoration of the Magi, frescoes of a lion and a wyvern, each from the Monastery of San Pedro de Arlanza in north-central Spain. [10] On the left of the room are portraits of kings and angels, also from the monastery at Moutier-Saint-Jean. [148] The hall contains three pairs of columns positioned over an entrance with molded archivolts. They were taken from the Augustinian church at Reugny. [149] The Reugny site was badly damaged during the French Wars of Religion and again during the French Revolution. Most of the structures had been sold to a local man, Piere-Yon Verniere, by 1850, and were acquired by Barnard in 1906. [94]

Treasury room Edit

The Treasury room was opened in 1988 to celebrate the museum's 50th anniversary. It largely consists of small luxury objects acquired by the Met after it had built its initial collection, and draws heavily on acquisitions from the collection of Joseph Brummer. [150] The rooms contains the museum's collection of illuminated manuscripts, the French 13th-century arm-shaped silver reliquary, [151] and a 15th-century deck of playing cards. [152]

Library and archives Edit

The Cloisters contains one of the Metropolitan's 13 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. [153] The library functions primarily as a resource for museum staff, but is available by appointment to researchers, art dealers, academics and students. [154] The archives contain early sketches and blueprints made during the early design phase of the museum's construction, 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". [155] Two important series of prints are kept on microfilm: the "Index photographique de l'art en France" and the German "Marburg Picture Index". [155]

The Cloisters is governed by the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan's collections are owned by a private corporation of about 950 fellows and benefactors. The board of trustees comprise 41 elected members, several officials of the City of New York, and persons honored as trustees by the museum. The current chairman of the board is the businessman and art collector Daniel Brodsky, who was elected in 2011, [156] having previously served on its Real Estate Council in 1984 as a trustee of the museum and Vice Chairman of the Buildings Committee. [157]

A specialist museum, the Cloisters regularly acquires new works and rarely sells or otherwise gets rid of them. While the Metropolitan does not publish separate figures for the Cloisters, the entity as a whole spent $39 million on acquisitions for the fiscal year ending in June 2012. [158] The Cloisters seeks to balance its collection between religious and secular artifacts and artworks. With secular pieces, it typically favors those that indicate the range of artistic production in the medieval period, and according to art historian Timothy Husband, "reflect the fabric of daily [medieval European] life but also endure as works of art in their own right". [159] In 2011 it purchased the then-recently discovered The Falcon's Bath, a Southern Netherlands tapestry dated c. 1400–1415. It is of exceptional quality, and one of the best preserved surviving examples of its type. [160] Other recent acquisitions of significance include the 2015 purchase of a Book of Hours attributed to Simon Bening. [47]

The museum's architectural settings, atmosphere, and acoustics have made it a regular setting both for musical recitals and as a stage for medieval theater. Notable stagings include The Miracle of Theophilus in 1942, and John Gassner's adaption of The Second Shepherds' Play in 1954. [161] Recent significant exhibitions include "Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures" which ran in the summer of 2017 in conjunction with the Art Gallery of Ontario and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. [162]

6) Role of SS Panzer Divisions

Allied Sherman tanks crossing the newly-captured bridge at Nijmegen in the Netherlands during their advance as part of Operation Market Garden.

Before Operation Market Garden even started, Allied intelligence got reports that two well-equipped German SS Panzer (tank) divisions were in the area around Arnhem. But commanders of the operation, including Lt. Gen. Frederick 𠇋oy” Browning, decided the operation should go ahead anyway𠅊 risk that turned into a disaster for Allied troops at Arnhem.

The slow advance of the XXX Corps gave Germany time to strengthen its defenses, confront the advancing ground troops at Nijmegen, and subject the lone British battalion at Arnhem to a crippling onslaught, which they resisted fiercely before submitting on the fifth day of the battle. With the main objective of the operation lost, more than 3,000 British troops dug in at Oosterbeek until September 25, when they were forced to begin evacuating across the Rhine.

History of the Qilin

The qilin first appeared in the historical record with the Zuo Zhuan, or "Chronicle of Zuo," which describes events in China from 722 to 468 BCE. According to these records, the first Chinese writing system was transcribed around 3000 BCE from the markings on a qilin's back. A qilin is supposed to have heralded the birth of Confucius, c. 552 BCE. The founder of Korea's Goguryeo Kingdom, King Dongmyeong (r. 37-19 BCE), rode a qilin like a horse, according to legend.

Much later, during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), we have solid historical evidence of at least two qilin showing up in China in 1413. Actually, they were giraffes from the coast of Somalia the great admiral Zheng He brought them back to Beijing after his fourth voyage (1413-14). The giraffes were immediately proclaimed to be qilin. The Yongle Emperor was naturally extremely pleased to have the symbol of wise leadership show up during his reign, courtesy of the Treasure Fleet.

Although traditional depictions of the qilin had a much shorter neck than any giraffe's, the association between the two animals remains strong to this day. In both Korea and Japan, the term for "giraffe" is kirin, or qilin.

Across East Asia, the qilin is one of the four noble animals, along with the dragon, the phoenix, and the tortoise. Individual qilin are said to live for 2000 years and can bring babies to deserving parents much in the manner of storks in Europe.

The Unicorn Rests in a Garden - History

The Unicorn in the Garden

by James Thurber
reprinted from
Fables For Our Time

Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses." She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him.

"The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there now he was browsing among the tulips. "Here, unicorn," said the man, and he pulled up a lily and gave it to him. The unicorn ate it gravely. With a high heart, because there was a unicorn in his garden, the man went upstairs and roused his wife again. "The unicorn," he said,"ate a lily." His wife sat up in bed and looked at him coldly. "You are a booby," she said, "and I am going to have you put in the booby-hatch."

The man, who had never liked the words "booby" and "booby-hatch," and who liked them even less on a shining morning when there was a unicorn in the garden, thought for a moment. "We'll see about that," he said. He walked over to the door. "He has a golden horn in the middle of his forehead," he told her. Then he went back to the garden to watch the unicorn but the unicorn had gone away. The man sat down among the roses and went to sleep.

As soon as the husband had gone out of the house, the wife got up and dressed as fast as she could. She was very excited and there was a gloat in her eye. She telephoned the police and she telephoned a psychiatrist she told them to hurry to her house and bring a strait-jacket. When the police and the psychiatrist arrived they sat down in chairs and looked at her, with great interest.

"My husband," she said, "saw a unicorn this morning." The police looked at the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist looked at the police. "He told me it ate a lilly," she said. The psychiatrist looked at the police and the police looked at the psychiatrist. "He told me it had a golden horn in the middle of its forehead," she said. At a solemn signal from the psychiatrist, the police leaped from their chairs and seized the wife. They had a hard time subduing her, for she put up a terrific struggle, but they finally subdued her. Just as they got her into the strait-jacket, the husband came back into the house.

"Did you tell your wife you saw a unicorn?" asked the police. "Of course not," said the husband. "The unicorn is a mythical beast." "That's all I wanted to know," said the psychiatrist. "Take her away. I'm sorry, sir, but your wife is as crazy as a jaybird."

So they took her away, cursing and screaming, and shut her up in an institution. The husband lived happily ever after.