ART REVIEW: CHOIR OF ANGELS: ILLUMINATING THE DARK AGES
New York Times
n/05ange.html?em
Dec 5 2008
NY
Of the three great artistic histories that extend for many centuries,
and galleries, from the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
the Byzantine-Medieval epic is the most discreet. The Egyptian and the
Greek and Roman wings are signaled by highly visible statues and tombs
that start waving hello almost before you clear security. In contrast,
the story of art starting in Bronze-Age Europe lies mostly out of
sight in galleries that lie beside and behind the Grand Staircase.
These days, if you stand in the right spot in the Great Hall and
look down the broad corridor gallery on the right of the stairs,
the unmistakable blaze of a tall, slim stained-glass window from
13th-century France glows like a beacon from about a half a football
field away. With wattage like that, who can resist medieval art?
The window is one of many new displays in the Met’s deliriously dense,
newly restored and reinstalled Gallery for Western European Medieval
Art from 1050 to 1300. A fairly extreme makeover, this renovation
began with a boldly geometric floor of red slate and black and white
marble that duplicates the one that was in place when the Met opened
its first building in 1895. The walls are lined with spare new cherry
wood vitrines based on ones used by J. P. Morgan, one of the Met’s
chief medieval-art patrons. His name appears frequently among the
labels for the works inside: the enamels, ivories, bejeweled book
covers and metalwork from all over Europe. And above and beyond the
vitrines, carved stone sculptures, capitals, reliefs, crucifixes and
stained-glass windows continue almost to the ceiling.
This renovation has been accompanied by smaller adjustments and changes
in adjacent galleries. The displays in the Mary and Michael Jaharis
Galleries for Byzantine Art, which opened in 2000 beside and behind
the stairs, have been refined to improve the chronological flow. The
Medieval Sculpture Hall, which lies just beyond the new medieval space
— where the Met’s popular Christmas tree resides at this time of year
— has been startlingly improved with nothing more than new lighting
and fresh paint. At the moment the sculpture hall also contains
"Choirs of Angels: Italian Painting and Choir Books 1300-1500,"
a sumptuous little holiday show that will last into the spring.
In all this spiffing up, little-seen works have emerged from storage;
others have come from galleries elsewhere in the museum. A few have
arrived from the Cloisters, the Met’s magnificent medieval assemblage
in Washington Heights.
These include a relief of the Nativity and Annunciation that was never
uncrated after its arrival in the 1940s, and the 12th-century Italian
ciborium, or altar canopy, that the Met has owned since 1909. Made
from limestone with hardstone and glass inlay, it has spent the last
60 years at the Cloisters. Now it stands at the center of the new
medieval gallery like a walk-through crown.
New gifts and loans add substance and delight. Mr. and Mrs. Jaharis
are the chief donors of an early-12th-century Byzantine Lectionary,
a rare liturgical manuscript believed to have been made for the Hagia
Sophia in Constantinople. The Library of the Jewish Theological
Seminary is lending a monumental Hebrew prayer book with outsize
calligraphy that has a Persian snap.
Nearby is an enormous cross, probably from 12th-century Armenia
and on loan from the History Museum of Armenia in Yerevan, that
country’s capital. Carved in pumicelike basalt, it teems with reliefs
suggesting intricate, knotted strap work (or macramé) in at least
five patterns. Don’t miss the face of the prophet Matthew peering
through a slot beneath the cross as if manning the door at a speakeasy.
The medieval art gallery is the first major renovation of any medieval
gallery at the Met in more than half a century — eons, even in the
slow-motion time of museums. Even discounting the intoxication of
the new, it is hard to think of another gallery in the museum — at
least of Western art — where there is more going on historically
and aesthetically and on such an even playing field in terms of
art mediums.
The brimming, light-flooded presentation has been orchestrated by Peter
Barnet, curator in chief of the museum’s medieval art department and
the Cloisters, his curators and the museum’s designers. They seem to
have wanted to mount a final assault on the notion of the medieval
period as backward, antiquated or benighted. This misconception
started in the full-of-itself Renaissance, which condescendingly
christened the previous era the Dark or Middle Ages. Medieval, as
the Enlightenment tagged it, only sharpened the bite.
With an effect that is at once artistic, archaeological and devotional,
this gallery recasts medieval art as a mammoth, busy and fast-moving
project translating the Holy Scriptures into visual form, making
them accessible to largely illiterate populations. It resulted in
a free-for-all of constant themes and boundless variations. The
stories recur again and again: Jonah and the Whale, Adam and
Eve, the Annunciation, the Virgin and Child, the Crucifixion, the
Entombment. (If your knowledge of the Bible is scant, medieval art
is an excellent makeup option.)
But there is nothing fixed about the techniques, styles and materials
of medieval art. Painting had not yet established its dominance; every
medium had its storytelling role. Classicism was not yet the Ideal, but
only one of many influences, which included barbaric ornamentation and
Persian motifs. And space, not yet locked into one-point perspective,
was subject to individual skill and imagination, regardless of medium;
ingenious stabs at it abounded.
For an idea of monastic productivity, immerse yourself in the corner
devoted to the champlevé enamel crucifixes, reliquaries, candlesticks
and much else that issued from the Grandmont monastery near Limoges,
France, and set the European standard. For quickness of evolution
from the Romanesque to the Gothic phases of medieval art, start with a
late-12th-century Spanish-stone capital of Samson fighting the lion,
which has the jutting, angular forms of early Modernism. Compare it
with "The Betrayal and Arrest of Jesus," a large relief of strikingly
naturalistic struggling figures made in France less than a century
later.
In one vitrine a line of small Virgins, mostly with Child, and
French, in wood, ivory or gilt and enamel copper, recapitulate the
same transition. Some things attract by sheer opulence, like the
two gilded-silver Spanish book covers with cabochon jewels and
ivory crucifixes, which belong to a bookbinding tradition that,
coincidentally, is traced up to the present in an exhibition now on
view at the Morgan Library. Other pieces draw you with unexpected
resonances. A vitrine devoted entirely to Southern Italian ivories
includes a small relief of Christ creating the animals that is surely
the DNA strand for Edward Hicks’s many "Peaceable Kingdom" paintings.
In the Medieval Sculpture Hall, the "Choir of Angels" show provides a
rare glimpse of gemlike illuminations that were once part of books of
religious music and used daily; their ornate initials would adorn a
composition’s opening page. Most were cut from these pages long ago,
which is why they are often referred to as cuttings. Together they
present a thumbnail history of one of the most exciting periods in
Italian painting, ranging, for example, from a letter inset with a
rendering of the battle of the Maccabees against a nearly vertical pink
and red Sienese landscape, to one that contains a suavely detailed,
spatially correct scene of Joseph being sold into slavery.
The initials are sometimes a little hard to read. They frequently
have an animalist or at least vegetal life of their own and may be
further distorted in their roles as proscenium stages. A double-peaked
initial containing stacked scenes of Easter is not an M but a
stretched A. Sometimes, but not always, the letters relate to the
chief characters, as with the elongated P that frames a heart-rending
depiction of the martyrdom of St. Peter in rich, dark browns and blues
that depart from the generally cheery sunshine palette of these works.
The stories told by the choir book illuminations often echo in the
seven large South Netherlandish tapestries that have hung in the
sculpture hall since who knows when. The effect of these works under
new lighting and against blue-gray walls can be summed up in two
words: absolutely spectacular. I could spend a week in front of the
early-15th-century Annunciation (first on the left), with its bright,
quiltlike tile floor; hallucinatory plant life; finely feathered angel;
and, in the foreground, sturdy two-handled blue-and-white jug that
most likely came from Italy or Spain.
Mr. Barnet and his team are not quite finished. Over the next month or
two they will complete the reinstallation of the two Medieval Treasury
galleries that lead from the sculpture hall toward the American
Wing. It will be more tweaking than renovation from the floor up,
but it will include facing walls inset with stained-glass windows that
visitors will pass between, as through a gantlet of color and light.
As part of the Met’s original, central structure, the new Medieval
Art gallery has always been a heavily trafficked intersection. It
shouldn’t really work as a gallery of sacred art and yet it does. Its
many small objects draw you close, away from the bustle, into a realm
where craft, faith and narrative were one. The magic of this fusion
is alive and well.
"Choir of Angels: Painting in Italian Choir Books, 1300-1500" is
on view through April 12 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212)
535-7710, metmuseum.org. The Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of
Byzantine Art and the Gallery for Western European Art from 1050 to
1300 will be open indefinitely.
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/arts/desig