Cloisters: Bright lights, Dark Ages

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.

"Age of Faith" is a better stereotype: The museum's galleries are filled with carved wood, ivory and stone representations of saints and angels.

The most moving gallery might be the Gothic Chapel, a few steps down from the main floor. Light from an exterior window lands on the tomb-topper of Jean d'Alluye, a knight from France's Loire Valley who died circa 1248 after a busy life. He returned from the Holy Land with what he believed to be a fragment of the True Cross. This life-size and lifelike limestone carving topped his remains when he was buried in an abbey. After the abbey was sacked and destroyed during the French Revolution, this elaborate work was supposedly used as a footbridge. The carving shows the knight sleeping face up, arms folded in prayer, his body in knightly armor and with a lion (representing bravery) at his feet.

Here and elsewhere at the Cloisters, it becomes clear how closely life intertwined with death. Average life expectancy was perhaps 35 for men, less for women, and much of the art back then was a display of piety that may have doubled as an insurance policy toward the afterlife.

The unicorn

One gallery is stocked with glassware. In another you can see a tiny, handpainted devotional book that belonged to a French queen in the 1320s. Nearby is the only full deck of cards known to survive the Middle Ages -- 52 fancy and handmade cards in four suits you may not expect (hunting horns, dog collars, tethers and nooses).

The biggest surprise may be the sunlit Glass Gallery, where windows facing the Bonnefont Cloister Garden are inlaid with roundels, remarkable stained-glass scenes from around 1500, each the size of a dinner plate. One scene depicts hell as a nightmare-blue place where demons and the Devil have bright yellow eyes. The unclothed Devil, carting a naked victim, has a second horrific face in his belly, and his thighs are beast heads that look to be consuming his taloned feet.

The display also has fanciful stained-glass depictions of parables as well as snippets of long-gone everyday life. The most delightful shows a trio of chimpanzee carpenters attempting to assemble a gaming table.