Some of you have no doubt heard of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or “The Met”, here in New York City. It’s a massive museum of art and culture, along Museum Mile on the east side of Central Park. (More about our visit there in another post.)
Less well known, however, are The Cloisters, a branch of The Met set in a monastery-like building in a park in north Manhattan. The Cloisters are devoted to medieval art and architecture — brought over from Europe and set up in the 1930’s. It’s pretty neat to see art and gardens displayed in a context that “takes you right back”.
I’m not a big fan of much of the art, especially the religious art (how many distorted pictures of Mary and Jesus do you need?), but the setting and the architecture was beautiful. Oh, and some of the thousand-year-old artifacts were great. It’s definitely amazing how much more effort “they” put into decorating certain things back then. Like a wooden chair with hundreds of little faces carved into it. Or a cup engraved and painted intricately with fairy tales.
Oh, well, without any further ado, below are some photos we took. Follow the links above to read more about The Cloisters.
Comments (2)
Liked the gargoyle and the chandelier!
Is this graupel that’s floating down the blog page? For a few seconds I thought something was going haywire with my screen.
Heh, yep, it’s snow. :-) We decided to have fun and turn it on. See also: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/snow-around-the-world/