Description
The Cloisters is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's branch for medieval art and architecture, on a hilltop in Fort Tryon Park, at the northern end of Manhattan, above the Hudson River. Its buildings are made of real pieces of monasteries and abbeys moved stone by stone from France and Spain, so the museum itself is part of the collection.
The building is centered around four cloisters, the covered garden walks of a monastery: Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont and Trie-sur-Baïse. Around them you walk through chapels and themed galleries: the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish and Gothic rooms.
Don't miss the Unicorn Tapestries, woven around 1500 in the Netherlands, with their rich colors and the unicorn hunt. In the Campin Room is the Mérode Altarpiece by Robert Campin, and in the Fuentidueña Chapel a Spanish Romanesque apse, shipped over in 839 crates.
Next to them, entered from the Cuxa cloister, the Nine Heroes tapestries, from about 1385, are among the earliest surviving examples of tapestry. The Unicorn set was once used by the French army to cover potatoes and keep them from freezing.
The medieval-style gardens, designed with the building by Charles Collens, grow plants known in the Middle Ages. The terraces look over the river and the Palisades on the other side.
The sculptor George Grey Barnard, whose collection would become The Cloisters, liked to tell how he cycled through the French countryside finding forgotten Gothic masterpieces, among them a knight's tomb effigy lying face down as a bridge over a stream.
Barnard bought parts of ruined French abbeys at low prices and shipped them to New York. Always short of money, he sold everything in 1925 to John D. Rockefeller Jr., although the two men did not get along: Rockefeller was reserved, Barnard exuberant.
Rockefeller paid for the rest: the land in Fort Tryon Park, the building, and even the clifftops of the New Jersey Palisades across the Hudson, bought to protect the view from development. The museum opened in 1938.
The building is centered around four cloisters, the covered garden walks of a monastery: Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont and Trie-sur-Baïse. Around them you walk through chapels and themed galleries: the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish and Gothic rooms.
Don't miss the Unicorn Tapestries, woven around 1500 in the Netherlands, with their rich colors and the unicorn hunt. In the Campin Room is the Mérode Altarpiece by Robert Campin, and in the Fuentidueña Chapel a Spanish Romanesque apse, shipped over in 839 crates.
Next to them, entered from the Cuxa cloister, the Nine Heroes tapestries, from about 1385, are among the earliest surviving examples of tapestry. The Unicorn set was once used by the French army to cover potatoes and keep them from freezing.
The medieval-style gardens, designed with the building by Charles Collens, grow plants known in the Middle Ages. The terraces look over the river and the Palisades on the other side.
The sculptor George Grey Barnard, whose collection would become The Cloisters, liked to tell how he cycled through the French countryside finding forgotten Gothic masterpieces, among them a knight's tomb effigy lying face down as a bridge over a stream.
Barnard bought parts of ruined French abbeys at low prices and shipped them to New York. Always short of money, he sold everything in 1925 to John D. Rockefeller Jr., although the two men did not get along: Rockefeller was reserved, Barnard exuberant.
Rockefeller paid for the rest: the land in Fort Tryon Park, the building, and even the clifftops of the New Jersey Palisades across the Hudson, bought to protect the view from development. The museum opened in 1938.