The Cloisters
in New York, United StatesCategory: Attraction
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99 Margaret Corbin Dr, New York, NY 10040, USA Print route »
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The Cloisters is a museum in Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, New York City specializing in European medieval architecture, sculpture, and decorative arts. Its architectural features are largely from the Romanesque and Gothic periods. The building centers on four cloisters—the Cuxa, Bonnefont, Trie, and Saint-Guilhem cloisters—sourced from French monasteries and abbeys. They were dismantled in Europe and between 1934 and 1939 reconstructed in a four-acre site in Washington Heights, during a large-scale and complex project overseen by the architect Charles Collens. Home to over 1000 medieval artworks, including stone and wood sculptures, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings, the building also contains early medieval gardens and a series of indoor chapels and thematic spaces, including the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish and Gothic rooms.Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its early collection was built by the American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard, which was acquired by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who in 1931 purchased the site at Washington Heights as a permanent home for the works.
The design, layout, and ambiance of the building is intended to evoke a sense of the medieval European monastic life through its architecture. The museum contains approximately five thousand medieval works of art from the Mediterranean and Europe, mostly from the 12th to 15th centuries—that is, from the Byzantine to the early Renaissance periods—but also works dating from the Bronze and early Iron Ages.
