Pietà (Vesperbild), ca.1400 Bohemian Limestone;15 x 15 3/8 x 5 1/2 in. (38.1 x 39.1 x 14 cm)
The Cloisters Collection, 2001

On July 1, 2006, The New York Times reported from Baghdad, “A powerful suicide car bomb ripped through a bustling street market in a Shiite slum here on Saturday, killing at least 62 people and wounding nearly 120.”  These commonplace statistics are symptomatic of an insensibility to the dead of war to which those of us living after the Holocaust and the atomic bomb seem vulnerable. There are no human beings in war; or rather, it is rare to find human beings in the scripted reportage of war.  The Times sentence, for instance, succeeds in turning human beings into a number.  Somehow, at some point, we began to assume that statistics could effectively convey atrocity when in fact by using them we have abstracted atrocity so far beyond ourselves that complacency in the matter is our only survival tactic.

On the same day that these suicide bombers tear through their own lives and the lives of their brothers and sisters, I make a small pilgrimage to The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that houses a major collection of work from medieval Europe.  Of the three ways to get there - subway, bus, or car - I choose the subway: its metal speed is indicative of the Manhattan that I leave behind.  The A-express-train speeds me up the West Side to the northwest corner of the island at 190th street.  I follow signs that say “The Cloisters” to a bank of three extremely functional and rather large stainless steel elevators.  Of the three, my favorite is the “Staffed Elevator.”  In a show of graciousness that is rare in New York, nearly everyone in that elevator seems encouraged to greet and thank the operator.  I find myself thinking that it must be a liminal space between Manhattan and a sensible appreciation of humanity.  While I’m in these mechanized boxes I also can’t help but feel good about the greenery into which I am about to walk.  Fort Tryon Park is a jungle by New York City standards: in the summer, the foliage is dense, dark, and shady.  In the comely Heather Garden, a large flower garden near the entrance to the park, I long for a backyard, yet am still contented with these three acres of flowers whose names I do not know.  Various New Yorkers walk, jog, and marry in Fort Tryon Park; they lounge in the sun on its small lawns, and enjoy the respite from the craze of the city.  Being quite high in elevation and overlooking the Hudson, the park has survived a transformation from being a true bastion in wartime to being one of New York’s bastions of peace.  It was a defensive stand for the Continental Army, who retreated from it in 1776, and it retains the name that the English subsequently gave it, after Sir William Tryon, the last British governor of New York.

Walking slower than the average New Yorker, I manage to stroll through the park to The Cloisters in about twenty minutes.  After descending from Fort Washington, a lookout of sorts, I spot the mounted and imposing tower of the museum.  From its hilltop, the building preaches severity and warmth, two poles of the monastic vocation that somehow meet in the architecture.  The combination is inviting.  The severity of a monastery should, ideally, be a reflection of the confidence that the monks have, that they know what matters most and need little else.  The severity of the monastery is both simple and functional.  It is a setting that invites one to forget the world’s trappings in order to focus on God and on all human beings--both the nuns and monks who call the monastery home and the guests who come to its doors as Christ.^[i]  If I can call The Cloisters severe, perhaps I, arriving from the turbulence of surviving Manhattan and the world in general, have only mistaken the monastery’s peace as an affront.  Indeed, the warm brown stone and terracotta roofs that sit calmly on the authoritarian base assure the pilgrim that rigidity might be only a façade.  The edifice is nonetheless impressive, with a cold, gray stone base, and dominant bell-tower looking out.

The museum’s front entrance seems enormous and even ominous, and it asserts that in coming here you have come to an alien place.  Entering the first hallway I encounter a monastic world of gothic windows and vaulted ceilings; it is a hallway made with charcoal stone, stark and sunlit.  Ascending the stairs of that hallway, toward the strangely modern coat-check and ticket-counter, my mind, heart, and body imbibe the overall simplicity.  I am not surprised.  I suspect that many of us visit The Cloisters precisely because it is this alien world that is mostly beautifully still and is therefore a retreat from the turbulent normality from which we arrive.  It seems clearer here that bombs in Baghdad are literal eruptions of the ferocity by which we live day-to-day.

The curators of The Cloisters face the challenge of maintaining the monastic vibe of the setting while simultaneously exhibiting the art, which comprises a rather explosive collection.  .  I notice two obvious and related difficulties facing the art world: curators must reconcile the size of their extensive collections with each object’s immanent beauty, and museum patrons must manage that enormity and beauty against the price of their admission fee.  Beauty will always suffer in these transactions.  The curators of The Cloisters thus address a perplexing issue in managing a large collection in a confined space: how does one free the greatness of the works as such and keep the environment in the state of peace that makes it such an apt locale for knowing art intimately?

The answer, I think, has less to do with the power of the curator and much more to do with the architectural possibilities of the monastic setting.  A monastery affords many opportunities to slow down, explore, and even play.  We who visit this museum need to slow down if we wish to appreciate the didactic efforts of the curators.  What is truly special about the museum is its architecture and horticulture.  The Cloisters itself was reconstructed as a medieval monastery from an array of architectural treasures that George Grey Barnard, an American sculptor, culled from around Europe.  The architects of the museum’s current manifestation, built in 1938, centered the museum on the gorgeous Cuxa Cloister, a garden-square decked by pink-marble Roman arches.  No matter where one goes in the museum, one is always aware of the Cuxa Cloister, from which the rest of the museum stems.  I enjoy seeing the sunshine or give way to rain here.  I take pleasure resting here, on the marble, with my back propped against a column and my legs stretched out.  One day I even made a sketch of the Cuxa Cloister; though it is rather fat and dropsical, I was serious enough about it.  Whereas most museums favor contemplation over creation, The Cloisters inspired and allowed me to commune with both the art and architecture.

Sitting atop the southern wall of the museum is the great garden of the Bonnefont Cloister, which overlooks Fort Tryon Park.  Part of the garden’s charm is its view, from which I watch a barge chug anonymously up the Hudson.  The garden centers on four superlatively beautiful quince trees, and is home to 300 or so different species of plants, which the gardeners have charmingly grouped: medicinal plants, culinary plants, plants used by medieval artists, and magic plants.  The magic plants have wonderful Potterish names, like Mugwort and Hound’s Tongue.  That they are designated “magic” rather than “magical” drops all the judgment that historical distance imparts in favor of the gardeners’ conviction that these plants might still be used for unscrupulous tricks (actually, a small sign that one might easily miss reads, “Poisonous Plants: Do Not Touch”; I am reminded of Macbeth).

On my most recent visit to the museum I spent most of my time in these two cloisters, especially the Bonnefont. During this trip I realized that The Cloisters is not about its art per se; the focus is on the building itself and how it encourages us to renew constantly our relationship with art.  Art objects of any kind often demand the high level of attention that can be lost in many of the larger, more visited museums.  The Cloisters is not huge, but its collection still demands enough of the viewer that it can prove overwhelming if one is not careful.  Much more than any other museum that I have visited, however, The Cloisters includes spaces that invites us to put the collection aside, allowing time and space for refocusing.  After amusing myself, puzzling over magic plants, I do not necessarily want to expend the immense effort that the collection in its entirety demands, but to attend to whichever few pieces draw me in.

Lack of scholarly art knowledge can inhibit the appreciation of medieval works considering many of the pieces are not aesthetically captivating.  In countless works, the colors are faded and the compositions flat in comparison with the high masterpieces of various renaissances, and the gorgeous paintings from early Pissarro on through Matisse. But, it seems that the value of the art in The Cloisters must in part transcend the art-historical and all relevant techne.  The art here is focused on one central aspect of medieval European life, the Christian.  Christ was an impoverished vagabond who loved, yet his fellows betrayed, abandoned, tortured, and crucified him. His story cries out against all the problems that humanity incurs upon itself.  We distrust each other outright, and often unravel those knots of trust we have created.  In lieu of tolerance, we offer a cold shoulder to vagabonds—our immigrants and refugees.  We deny the humanness of our enemies through reprisals of premeditated, sanctioned bloodshed.

The Cloisters is a place of peace, but there is little art in it that does not attest to suffering. A major set of works, The Unicorn Tapestries, are probably the museum’s dearest artifact.  These huge woven tapestries, composed of approximately 900 sq. feet of material, tell a story of the hunt, death, and rebirth of the magical unicorn.  The weavers’ attention to detail is astounding: colors grade into shadow in every fold of the hunters’ clothing and in each turn of the leaves and flowers.  If you seek beauty in coming to The Cloisters, spend your time with the foliage in these tapestries, particularly with the varietal splendor of the last tapestry, The Unicorn in Captivity.  I am as equally amazed by the strange depictions of the hunters’ brutality in the penultimate tapestry, The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle.  As one hunter slits his spear into the unicorn’s right chest, his face evinces indifference, melancholy, anger, and even bitterness.  The feelings are directed simultaneously at himself, the unicorn, and the hunt.  The man behind him, whose spear is planted like a shovel in the unicorn’s neck, seems mostly undisturbed.  He is contemplative, perhaps a bit sad.  The third man, who stands behind the unicorn with an unused sword, seems shrewdly delighted with the unicorn’s death and with his own probable reward.  He is satisfied, congratulating himself on the fact that he had no true role in the dubious project.  The unicorn, with his tongue projecting out of its mouth in the cough of death, is resigned.

One great value of this tapestry lives in the unadorned suffering that it presents. In The Unicorn at Bay, the third of the tapestries, the unicorn stabs one of the hunting dogs.  The weavers did not spare us the details: the unicorn slices open the greyhound’s ribs and red blood pours from the open flesh. The unicorn was generally conceived of in the medieval period as a Christ-figure. The fact that it rather unkindly stabs a dog opens the tapestries to complex interpretations that may involve ideas of power and/or the courtly romantic ideal.  In one simpler reading, the unicorn prefigures Christ’s own death in killing this dog, as Christ is lanced in the side by a Roman soldier after he has died on the cross.  The museum is full of the side-wound image, and the art demands that we take it seriously.

It is not comfortable to move from the peace of the Bonnefont Cloister garden into the adjacent room marked “Glass Gallery,” where there is a very small yet noteworthy Pieta.  Here we find a limp, emaciated Christ, with two lips of flesh peeling away from his ribs, propped on the Virgin Mary’s lap.  This anonymous Pieta is perhaps the purest I have ever seen. While Michelangelo’s Pieta in St. Peter’s Basilica is almost platonically beautiful, he does not realize the suffering of the moment as fully as the anonymous artist of the Cloister’s Pieta.  The latter’s Christ is sickeningly dead: his open mouth recalls the agony of his murder, the giving up of the last breath. But it is Mary who commands attention in the aftermath of her son’s death.  She suffers for her son, yet she smiles hopefully at him.  At the same time, she gazes straight through him, and is utterly lost.  She seems attentive and consoled.  The anonymous artist somehow captures, in Mary’s two-inch face, the mystery of the anxiety that attends the miracle of promised Love.

At The Cloisters, we do not encounter the numbers of the dead that we are accustomed to seeing in the newspapers.  Instead, The Cloister’s encourage us to think about representations of only one death.  This contemplative relationship that The Cloisters encourages is important: it can renew the art for us so that we can allow ourselves to be renewed.  Percy Shelley says about poetry:

The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own. A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination: and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination.^[ii]

So it should be with art. After numerous viewings of the anonymous Pieta, I still understand its significance only at an intellectual level.  Looking at Christ, one senses that this is how the world responds to Love.  Looking at Mary, one senses that this is how God wants us to respond to indifference and the suffering that it causes.

I bought a postcard of the Pieta, hoping that it would remind me to think not just about art, but also about compassion and sorrow.  As the threads of stability unravel in the Holy Land, the prospect of peace taking root throughout the world looks bleak.  I wonder how it would be different if we all valued and had access to a space like The Cloisters.  The museum invites us into an empathetic relationship with the human particular.  In focusing on works like The Unicorn Tapestries and the Pieta, we are asked to engage with the pains and pleasures of humanity.  The Cloisters fosters this engagement through its potential to renew our relationship with art.  It is one place that we can take advantage of for furthering our education in the great secret of morals.

Notes

^[i]St. Benedict writes in his Rule for monasteries, “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ.” The Rule of St. Benedict, Edited by Timothy Fry, O.S.B. (New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1998), p. 51.

^[ii] Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, paragraph 13, http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/displayprose.cfm?prosenum=6.