Day 2.2 - The Cloisters

The Cloisters is several things. It is the name of a building in Fort Tryon Park, up near the northern tip of Manhattan island. It is also the name of the museum located in (and of) the building, which is a branch of the Metropolitan Museum.

The building itself reminds me of the follies found in C18th English gardens. It may not be a folly in the strictest sense, but it unarguably a contemporary assemblage intended to evoke ancient structures from different times and different places. It is a melange, a cornucopia, a fantasy mix of architectural remnants, most pinched from Europe before the Europeans got wise to the idea and banned the export (?theft) of such culturally significant items. (Okay, so the bits were mostly pinched from churches and monasteries that had fallen derelict since the French Revolution, but never mind. And we'll also leave aside the hypocrisy of refusing to return the Elgin Greek Marbles.)

[Insert disclaimer: I did a year of European Architecture 101 twenty-mumble years ago, and assert that not only are there likely to be errors in the following, you should be pleasantly surprised if I get anything right. At home, I might do some fact-checking etc, but on a single iPad screen, it's too much like hard work. Carrying on...]

In any given room at the Cloisters, there might be a low gothic doorway, and a high gothic lintel and a trefoil window and a romanesque arch, and so on. Okay, it might not be quite that bad - the romanesque arched (round) windows might be in the adjacent room to the gothic arched (pointy) ones, but it's still very odd.



Now there are plenty of buildings with multiple styles present in them, (see my upcoming post about the Cathedral of St John the Divine), but they generally come by that honestly, usually because it took too long to build and the fashion and/or the architect and/or the benefactor(s) changed. The Cloisters is deliberately a mish-mash, a sampler, a hodge-podge.

There are three cloisters within the Cloisters, each a courtyard surrounded by a covered verandah. They were (are) a place of quiet contemplation (and sometimes the herb garden too). The colonnades, or rows of columns, supporting the verandah roof were often intricately carved.





The capitals were often extravagantly decorated, including this one showing people being chained and thrown into the firey pits of hell.



I gave up not long after, but I did have a cup of tea, and make use of the restrooms before I left. New York has lots of beautiful parks but I have yet to see a free-standing public toilet.