Illuminating the Dark Ages (Metropolitan Museum/Exhibit)
Of the three great artistic histories that extend for many centuries, and galleries, from the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Byzantine-Medieval epic is the most discreet. The Egyptian and the Greek and Roman wings are signaled by highly visible statues and tombs that start waving hello almost before you clear security. In contrast, the story of art starting in Bronze-Age Europe lies mostly out of sight in galleries that lie beside and behind the Grand Staircase.
These days, if you stand in the right spot in the Great Hall and look down the broad corridor gallery on the right of the stairs, the unmistakable blaze of a tall, slim stained-glass window from 13th-century France glows like a beacon from about a half a football field away. With wattage like that, who can resist medieval art?
The window is one of many new displays in the Met’s deliriously dense, newly restored and reinstalled Gallery for Western European Medieval Art from 1050 to 1300. A fairly extreme makeover, this renovation began with a boldly geometric floor of red slate and black and white marble that duplicates the one that was in place when the Met opened its first building in 1895. The walls are lined with spare new cherry wood vitrines based on ones used by J. P. Morgan, one of the Met’s chief medieval-art patrons. His name appears frequently among the labels for the works inside: the enamels, ivories, bejeweled book covers and metalwork from all over Europe. And above and beyond the vitrines, carved stone sculptures, capitals, reliefs, crucifixes and stained-glass windows continue almost to the ceiling.
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These days, if you stand in the right spot in the Great Hall and look down the broad corridor gallery on the right of the stairs, the unmistakable blaze of a tall, slim stained-glass window from 13th-century France glows like a beacon from about a half a football field away. With wattage like that, who can resist medieval art?
The window is one of many new displays in the Met’s deliriously dense, newly restored and reinstalled Gallery for Western European Medieval Art from 1050 to 1300. A fairly extreme makeover, this renovation began with a boldly geometric floor of red slate and black and white marble that duplicates the one that was in place when the Met opened its first building in 1895. The walls are lined with spare new cherry wood vitrines based on ones used by J. P. Morgan, one of the Met’s chief medieval-art patrons. His name appears frequently among the labels for the works inside: the enamels, ivories, bejeweled book covers and metalwork from all over Europe. And above and beyond the vitrines, carved stone sculptures, capitals, reliefs, crucifixes and stained-glass windows continue almost to the ceiling.