Visiting The Cloisters is like a sudden plunge back into the Middle Ages. By its very architecture, built with Connecticut millstone granite and local mica schist, The Cloisters is a twentieth-century museum evoking a medieval atmosphere. Atop a hill in upper Manhattan's Fort Tyron Park, with sweeping views of the Hudson River and New Jersey's Palisades, the commanding structure seems remote from the urban struggle of New York City.
Once inside the museum, a modern visitor can begin to appreciate through this unique institution's exhibition of sculpture, metalwork, tapestries, stained glass, manuscripts, and panel paintings how art played a major role in the life of the average medieval citizen.
This appreciation would certainly gratify The Cloisters' benefactor, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Donating funds to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the creation of a branch museum devoted to medieval art, Rockefeller fulfilled his desire to provide an opportunity for museum visitors to find inspiration in the spiritual beauty of medieval works of art. "If those who come under the influence of this place," Rockefeller declared at the dedication of The Cloisters, "go out to face life with new courage and restored faith because of the peace, the calm, the loveliness they have found here.... Those who have built here will not have built in vain."
May 10, 1988, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Rockefeller's address and the opening of The Cloisters. In those fifty years, an estimated twelve million people have been enriched by its superb collection, which has continued to grow in size and diversity.
Barnard's 'Antiques'
The history of the Cloisters began with the American sculptor George Grey Barnard. In 1905, Barnard began collecting and selling what he referred to as "antiques." Barnard's "antiques" were medieval sculpture and architectural elements that he found lying in farm fields throughout the countryside of southern France. Most often, these works of art had been salvaged from ruins of monasteries and churches damaged or destroyed during Huguenot uprisings in the sixteenth century or later during the French Revolution. Over the centuries, these stone fragments had been removed by local inhabitants and reused--often for such humble purposes as supports in vineyards. Barnard recognized the artistic worth of these recycled "old stones." By selling them he was able to finance his own projects.
To exhibit his collection as well as some unsold architectural fragments, Barnard established a museum in New York City on Fort Washington Avenue in upper Manhattan. The arcades from Romanesque and Gothic cloisters and from the French monasteries of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Trie-en-Bigorre, and the Benedictine priory of Froville were installed in a churchlike brick building, thus suggesting the name by which Barnard's museum became popularly known. His "cloisters museum" was opened to the public in 1914, with Barnard's expressed intention being to introduce young American sculptors to the craftsmanship of what he termed "the patient Gothic chisel."
The opening introduced a new concept in museum installation. To exhibit works of art in a simulation of original surroundings was a revolutionary idea
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