NEW YORK -- The Cloisters is not so much a museum as a house for worship.
It's not only the powerful medieval artworks that inspire such reverence, but the setting as well.
The museum was designed at an architect's desk but looks and feels as if built by a group of European monks sometime between the 12th and 15th centuries and later transported to New York. Even if you've never had any religious training, visitors might feel an urge to kneel or bow their heads. Some report a scent of incense or the faint echoes of monk robes rustling over the stone floors.
In several places, the 1938 museum, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a treasure of antiquity itself. Many sections of the museum's walls, columns and rooms are the remains of medieval European monasteries that were painstakingly taken apart, shipped here and rebuilt on a rock outcropping overlooking the Hudson River in the picturesque and residential Fort Tryon Park area.
The Pontaut Chapter House room on the museum's main floor is the real thing. "Every little stone, every little brick, was numbered and wrapped and brought here and then rebuilt," the guide explained to a tour group huddled on benches in the stony-cold room.
"I'm glad they put the glass in these windows," the guide said, gesturing toward a foot-wide break in the stone wall of the Pontaut Chapter House room. "Of course, there would have been no glass when this room was first built, and everything could come in: the wind, rain, cold, bugs ..."
It's just one of the many reminders that life was harder in the 12th and 13th centuries, even if you lived the relatively privileged life of a monk.
But the museum's collection shows that hardships did not stifle artistic spirits. Hand-engraved manuscripts and books illuminated in gold, chalices, candlesticks, censers, cruets, ewers, caskets for holy relics, crosses, missal covers and all other items associated with a religious rite are on view at The Cloisters.
Centuries-old carved statuary, stained glass and the renowned Unicorn tapestries also are among the museum holdings, which span from the Romanesque period, dating from about A.D. 1000 to between 1150 and 1200, through the Gothic era, which lasted from about 1150 to about 1520.
The smallest items are displayed in the aptly named area called The Treasury. It is on the lower level in a subtly lit sanctuary of glass and wood exhibit cases.
