The "A" Train runs from JFK International to Times Square to the Middle Ages: Its terminus in northwest Manhattan is near The Cloisters, an amazing place where you can step into a world that revolved around sacred icons, plague and what a full bag of gold florins could buy.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is Manhattan's big art museum. Its pre-pyramids-Egyptian to 21st-century collections are housed in a venue that dwarfs Buckingham Palace and fronts Central Park. A whopping 4.5 million visitors went to the Met last year.
The Cloisters is its odd little sibling that you don't hear much about. Attendance last year: 220,000. It's tucked away in pastoral Fort Tryon Park, on a bluff with stunning views of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades beyond. Scan the park's tree line for a tower that looks as if it was built about 1,000 years ago. That's The Cloisters, home of the largest collection of medieval art in North America. And that tower, by the way, is an original: a spanking new skyscraper, circa A.D. 940 in the French Pyrenees.
The Cloisters and its contents were brought together by tycoon-turned-philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. -- one of the men behind the Met and Virginia's Colonial Williamsburg -- who had amassed a choice collection of statues, books and other items crafted by European artisans between the First Crusade and the Renaissance. In 1925, he made it possible for the Met to purchase the collection of sculptor and art collector George Barnard, who had acquired a considerable assortment of ruined medieval odds and ends in France. Rockefeller also picked up Barnard's private museum, where those pieces were displayed, and some adjoining land. The real estate was given to New York City for a park. Barnard's items and Rockefeller's personal stash became the medieval-themed Cloisters.
A cloister was a medieval monastery that featured covered outdoor walkways facing an enclosed garden. The spaces were perfect for monks who needed peace and quiet -- and the tranquility at this one defies the loud hustle of New York.
Five cloisters form museum
The two-level Cloisters building itself is an amazing consolidation, parts of five different cloisters shipped to the New World and expertly cemented into one facility with ornate limestone columns, arches and other pieces of architecture worked in. Troves of authentic artifacts from those times are in short supply. At The Cloisters, they're numerous -- approximately 1,846 -- and displayed indoors and outdoors. They range from the very large (complete, reassembled chapels) to the tiny.
They collectively show Western Europe on a learning curve that starts in the ancient world and ends in the Renaissance. Medieval artists were often clueless when it came to visual perspective: Figures on the horizon in paintings and tapestries are the same size as those in the foreground. But calling those centuries the "Dark Ages" isn't accurate. You see remarkable skills and achievements that get little attention.
