NYT: The Dark ages at the Met

Art Review | 'Choir of Angels'
Illuminating the Dark Ages
By ROBERTA SMITH
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.

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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.