Patriarchs of the Pentateuch

(The Cloisters Museum and Gardens, Ft Tryon Park, NYC)

By ROBERT EDWARD BULLOCK, Special to the Sun | March 8, 2014

Once in 835 years qualifies as a rare event, and for the first time since their creation in 1178 six very fine and incredibly beautiful stained glass windows are on display outside of England's Canterbury Cathedral.

With "Radiant Light: Stained Glass from Canterbury Cathedral," The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, Manhattan, continues to celebrate its 75th anniversary. Situated on the cliffs of northern Manhattan overlooking the Hudson River and the Palisades, The Cloisters seems centuries-removed from modern times and is the ideal setting for this small exhibit.

(Read the entire review at The New York Sun.)

              

^ "Abraham" from the Ancestors of Christ Windows, Canterbury Cathedral, England, 1178-80 (© Robert Greshoff Photography, courtesy Dean and Chapter of Canterbury)

Hildesheim's Medieval Splendor

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 521: Special Exhibition)

Hildesheim's Medieval Splendor 

by Robert Edward Bullock, Special to the Sun

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Twelfth-century Europe was a complex and varied culture of often overlapping religion, politics, and private life. This is reflected in the arts of the period, a high-water mark of imagination and craftsmanship. Like other cultures of deep and widely held faith, Medieval Europe - Christendom - created precious objects that, born of such high sentiments, were like prayers rendered in gold, silver, and precious stones.

Works of art delivered the Christian message by glorifying the Holy. Just as in the Torah, where God instructs the Jews to use "the purest gold" in the temple, the most precious materials were appropriate in the service of the Catholic Church. In his “De Consecratione,” the twelfth-century abbot of St-Denis, Abbot Suger, praised the working of gold and silver and precious stones to "conjoinest the material with the immaterial, the corporeal with the spiritual, the human with the Divine". 

Sparkling like King Solomon's mines, "Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim" is the Metropolitan Museum's dazzling new exhibit of church furnishings and treasures from Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany's Lower Saxony region. Consecrated in 872 and designated a UNESCO world cultural heritage site in 1985 along with Saint Michael's Church in Hildesheim, its collection of .....

(read the full review at The New York Sun)

Reichenau Gospel Lectionary and Collectar, ca. 1010–30 (Dombibliothek Hildesheim; Photograph by Lutz Engelhardt)

Ringelheim Crucifix, ca. 1000 / before 1022 (Dom-Museum Hildesheim, on loan from the church of Sts. Abdon and Sennen, Salzgitter- Ringelheim)

Reliquary of Saint Oswald, ca. 1185–89; partly restored 1779 (Dom-Museum Hildesheim; Photograph by Lutz Engelhardt)

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Medieval Art Collection. Notes of May 24, 2013, 6:30 PM)

(^ Saint Peter as the First Pope. ca. before 1348. Spain. Pine partially covered with canvas, gesso, paint. 79 x 22.5 x 13″. Rogers Fund, 1926/ Accession Number: 27.18.2)                             

I watch as one person after another takes pictures of this or that artwork with their tablet or cell phone and walk away --- just walk away. There is no attempt to reckon with the actual thing in front of them. They may as well have stayed home and browsed the collection online. To stand before a 14th-century polychromed Christian sculpture of Saint Peter is to see the physical work of someone who lived and thought and created 700 years ago ---  the grain of the wood, the way the features are carved by hand and gessoed, the way the paint was applied. You see it from the side and their lack of understanding about anatomy and the depth of their faith are all there. That is not something that is recorded in a quick snapshot on a cell phone. But no one cares.

We no longer consider the reproduction to be something to refer to when the original is not available to see. The reproduction is now an acceptable, maybe even preferable, substitute for the original. Why bother standing in front of the physical object itself when you can look at a photo of it (if the photo is ever looked at)? Who cares about the one-on-one interaction that is only possible with the actual thing? Maybe the comment about this, made to me by someone recently, that these pictures are probably just to post on Facebook to appear "cool", is accurate.