a haaa...yes the Cloisters! I love that place. It's right on the Hudson River just above the George Washington Bridge. I highly recommend spending at least a few hours here if you haven't already.
OK, unc. You're up...go hide.
The Cloisters is the branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to the art and architecture of the European Middle Ages. The Cloisters is located in New York City, USA, specifically Fort Tryon Park near the northern tip of Manhattan island on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. The Cloisters include the museum building and the adjacent 4 acres (16,000 m²).
Collection
The Cloisters collection contains approximately five thousand European medieval works of art, with a particular emphasis on pieces dating from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.
Among the famous works of art held at the Cloisters are seven south Netherlandish tapestries depicting The Hunt of the Unicorn, Robert Campin's Mérode Altarpiece, and the Romanesque altar cross known as the Cloisters Cross or Bury St. Edmunds Cross, which was acquired under the curatorship of Thomas Hoving. The Cloisters also holds many medieval manuscripts and illuminated books, including the Limbourg brothers' Les Belles Heures du Duc de Berry and Jean Pucelle's book of hours for Jeanne d'Evreux.
The building housing the collection is itself a work of medieval art. It is a composite structure, incorporating elements from five medieval French cloisters: Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, Trie-en-Bigorre, and Froville. These disassembled European buildings were reassembled in Fort Tryon Park (1934/38) in a setting with gardens planted according to horticultural information culled from various medieval documents and artifacts. Notable works of architecture include the Cuxa cloister, with an adjacent Chapter House; and the Fuentidueña Apse from a chapel in the province of Segovia (Castilla y León, Spain).
