The Cloisters

Listen for a moment. The traffic of Manhattan has faded behind you, and the loudest sound may be your own footsteps on worn stone. The air in the arcades feels cool, even on a warm day. Somewhere nearby, water drips into a fountain. Light falls through narrow arches and lands in pale rectangles on the floor. You are still on the island of Manhattan, but very little here was made in America. Most of the stones around you were carved in Europe, many centuries ago.

This is The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. The building stands on a high ridge in Fort Tryon Park, near the northern tip of Manhattan. It looks like a monastery. It is not one. No monks ever lived here. Instead, it is a museum that brings together pieces of real medieval buildings, joined with new stonework designed to match them.

The story starts with a sculptor named George Grey Barnard. In the early twentieth century, he travelled through rural France. He bought carved capitals, columns, doorways, and other fragments, often from farmers and villagers. Some pieces had been taken from ruined abbeys after the French Revolution. Barnard shipped his collection to New York. He opened his own small museum of medieval art a short distance south of this hill, in 1914. Visitors came to see stone saints and beasts in a city of new skyscrapers.

Then a much larger figure entered the story. The philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Junior paid for the Metropolitan Museum to buy Barnard's collection in the 1920s. Rockefeller also bought the land that became Fort Tryon Park, and he gave it to the city. Inside the park, he set aside this hilltop for a new museum. The architect Charles Collens designed the building. It opened to the public in 1938. Here is a detail that many visitors miss — Rockefeller also bought land on the cliffs across the Hudson River, in New Jersey, to protect the view from development.

So when you look west from the terraces, the wooded Palisades on the far shore are part of the design. The green cliffs and the wide grey river help the illusion. From certain angles, you see no towers, no billboards, only water, trees, and sky. This hill also has an older history. During the American Revolution, it was part of the defences around Fort Washington. In 1776, British and Hessian troops captured the area after a fierce battle. The quiet park around you was once a battlefield.

The museum takes its name from its cloisters. A cloister is a covered walkway around an open courtyard. In a medieval monastery, it was the centre of daily life. Monks walked there, read there, and prayed there. The Cloisters includes elements from several such spaces. The largest comes from the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, in the Pyrenees mountains of southern France. Its pink marble columns frame a garden with paths that cross in the middle, a classic monastic layout.

Walk slowly along the Cuxa arcade and look at the capitals, the carved blocks at the top of each column. These are Romanesque carvings. Romanesque is the style of European building before the Gothic, with round arches and heavy walls. The carvers filled these stones with lions, monkeys, twisting vines, and strange creatures with two bodies and one head. Some figures look funny. Some look frightening. Scholars still debate what many of them meant to the monks who passed them every day.

Another cloister comes from Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, also in southern France. Here the space is enclosed and covered by a glass skylight, so it feels like a quiet indoor garden in every season. The column carvings are deep and lively, with leaves that curl out from the stone. Nearby, a whole apse stands inside the museum. An apse is the rounded end of a church, behind the altar. This one comes from the Spanish church of San Martín at Fuentidueña. It was taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt here.

Now for one of the great treasures. In a room with soft light hang the Unicorn Tapestries, woven around the year 1500. They show a hunt. Noblemen and dogs chase a white unicorn through a forest. In the most famous panel, the unicorn rests inside a small round fence, under a pomegranate tree, on a field full of flowers. The red drops on its white coat may be pomegranate juice, not blood. Rockefeller gave these tapestries to the museum in the 1930s.

Look closely at those flowers in the tapestries. The weavers showed real plants with great care. Botanists have identified many of them, including violets, daisies, and wild strawberries. That link between art and plants continues outside. In the Bonnefont garden, the museum grows plants that people in the Middle Ages used for food, medicine, dyes, and household work. Small labels name each plant. In summer the beds fill with scent and with bees. Some of the plants were once believed to have almost magical powers.

Several smaller works deserve your time. The Annunciation Triptych, often called the Mérode Altarpiece, is a fifteenth-century painting from the workshop of Robert Campin, in what is now Belgium. It shows the Virgin Mary in an ordinary Flemish home. Here is the second surprise. In the right-hand panel, Joseph works as a carpenter, and he is making mousetraps. One finished trap sits on the window ledge. Some scholars read it as a symbol of the devil being caught. Others see simple daily life.

In the Treasury, the scale becomes very small. Here you find metalwork, enamels, books, and carved ivory. One famous piece is a large cross carved from walrus ivory, probably in twelfth-century England. Its surface is covered with tiny figures and inscriptions. Elsewhere you may find a carved prayer bead no bigger than a walnut. When you open it in your imagination, a whole scene with dozens of figures sits inside. Take your time in these rooms. The detail rewards patient eyes.

Before you leave, stand for a moment in one of the gardens or at the edge of the terrace. Notice the warm stone under your hand, the smell of herbs, the wind that comes up from the river. These walls were made by many people who never imagined New York. Their work travelled across an ocean to reach this hill. As you walk back down through the park, listen as the city slowly returns — and carry a little of this quiet with you.