For those of us addicted to the Romanesque, the wealth of eleventh- and twelfth-century frescoes in the National Museum of Catalan Art is among the highlights of Barcelona, even more exciting, it could be argued, than the city’s much-vaunted examples of Antoni Gaudí’s architecture. (Let’s not discuss the ethics of detaching the paintings from the walls of the small, remote churches for which they were conceived and moving them into a neutral, non-ecclesiastical setting.) For New Yorkers, failing a trip to Barcelona, the next best thing is a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s treasure house of medieval art and architecture, The Cloisters. To console us for the lack of the riches of Barcelona, there is, for instance, a fresco of a fabulous, enormous dromedary (possibly 1129–34), from the monastery of San Baudelio de Berlanga, Castile-Léon. The animated, stylized beast is noteworthy for his sinuous neck and improbable feet, like paired catcher’s mitts, possibly inspired by the artist’s having seen the actual animal with its desert-worthy pads. Should the camel not prove sufficient to assuage one’s Romanesque deprivation, there are additional frescoes nearby from the same monastery, made at the same time, with scenes from the life of Christ. The figures in these paintings, with their oversized, perfectly round halos and stylized drapery, are as solemn and hieratic as the dromedary is playful, as they enact the Healing of the Blind Man, the Raising of Lazarus, and the Temptation of Christ by the Devil. (The Devil,
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Medieval Spain at The Cloisters
On “Spain, 1000–1200: Art at the Frontiers of Faith” at The Met Cloisters.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 40 Number 2, on page 41
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