Myopia at the Museum
by Sarah Loft
Title
Myopia at the Museum
Artist
Sarah Loft
Medium
Photograph - Digitally Painted Photograph
Description
This was a photograph taken in the Spanish Fuentidueña Chapel at the Cloisters Museum in New York City.
Per Wikipedia: The Cloisters is a museum in Upper Manhattan, New York City specializing in European medieval architecture, sculpture and decorative arts, and is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its early collection was built up by the American sculptor, art dealer and collector George Grey Barnard, and acquired by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1925. Rockefeller extended the collection and in 1931 purchased the site at Washington Heights and contracted the design for the Cloisters building.
The Fuentidueña hall is the museum's largest room. It opens with oak doors flanked by sculptures of leaping animals. It is built around the Fuentidueña Apse, a semicircular Romanesque apse dated c. 1175–1200, from the San Martín church at Fuentidueña, Segovia. The room contains a hanging crucifix and frescos honoring the Virgin Mary. The chapel consists of a rectangular courtyard with covered walk ways, and beds of flowering shrubs and plants.
The apse was built from over 3,300 individual stone blocks, mostly sandstone and limestone, which were shipped to New York in 839 individual crates. It was such a major and large installation into the Cloisters that it necessitated the knocking of the former "Special Exhibition Room". It was opening to the public in 1961, seven years after the transfer, its re-instillation was a major and highly innovative undertaking. The new space seeks to emulate a single aisle nave.
The capitals include representations of the Adoration of the Magi and Daniel in the lions' den. Its piers contain the figures of Saint Martin of Tours on the left, and the angel Gabriel announcing to The Virgin on the right. The Fuentidueña room includes a number of other, mostly contemporary medieval art works set within the Fuentidueña Apse. They include, in its dome, a large fresco c. 1130–50, from the Spanish Church of Sant Joan de Tredòs, in its colorisation resembling a Byzantine mosaic and is dedicated to the ideal of Mary as the mother of God. Hanging within the apse is a c. 1150–1200 crucifix from the convent of St. Clara at Astudillo.
By the 19th century the Sant Joan church was long abandoned and in disrepair. In the late 1940s the apse was moved and reconstructed in The Cloisters, a process than involved the shipping of almost 300 blocks of stone from Spain to New York. The acquisition followed three decades of complex negotiation and diplomacy between the Spanish church and both countries art historical hierarchies and governments. It was eventually exchanged in a deal that involved the transfer of six frescoes from San Baudelio de Berlanga to the Prado, on an equally long term loan.
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Uploaded
June 9th, 2011
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