0028 Station-of-the-Cross IV in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral
0034 The Saint Rose of Lima Chapel in St. Pat’s
0046 The Musicians by Caravaggio, my favorite of the three paintings by him at the Met
0052 The Conversion of Saint Paul by Benozzo Gozzoli. I’m pretty sure this is not proper 1st Century Judean clothing.
May 2 – New York City, NY. Today we started out earlier than yesterday because we’ve got a long schedule. We’re going to start by visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The latter is a huge building with a wide ranging and very nice collection of all sorts of art from all time periods. My goal is to see about four of the collections in depth and try to skim at least part of the rest. Lace up those walkin’ shoes, at the end of today our dogs will be barkin’.
This morning we are taking the subway heading for Queens but will get off before it crosses under the East River. A short 1.5 blocks south of the exit is St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I remarked on how almost every cathedral we visited in Europe has had scaffolding around at least part of the building. Well, St. Patrick’s is not going to be outdone by the Europeans; it has scaffolding not only around the entire front façade but around the inside as well. Too bad, it’s a beautiful building but it’s still open for visitors.
If you’ve followed my journal before you already know that I’m fascinated by the Stations-of-the-Cross found in cathedrals. In St. Pat’s they are large, carved reliefs, very detailed and beautifully executed. The side chapels were all visible as the scaffolding inside was on either side of the main nave. Each chapel included a sample prayer that was appropriate for each of the people memorialized. For example, at the chapel of Saint Rose of Lima the prayer is, “God our Father, Saint Rose, for love of you, gave up everything to devote herself to a life of penance. By the help of her prayers may we imitate her selfless way of life on earth and enjoy the fullness of your blessings in heaven. Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.”
The stained glass windows are beautiful but the scaffolding made it impossible to get a decent picture of them.
From there we took the #6 subway north to about the center of the eastern border of Grand Central Park. That’s the site of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My hope is that we will have time to visit the early European Painting and Sculpture, the Impressionists and maybe part of the Medieval collections. They have three paintings by Michelangelo Merisi (aka Caravaggio) that I have to see.
We arrived at the Met around 11:30am and were both thirsty and hungry. After paying our admission (once again voluntary) we went directly through the museum to the cafeteria at the rear. On our way we passed through the Medieval Arts section. They have an impressive collection of armor, early clocks and religious art from that period. We stopped to admire some of them on the way. I have a special fascination for clocks and they have a great one. It was made in Germany (Augsburg, the country of Germany wasn’t created until the late 1800s) in the early 1600s. It’s quite a marvel.
The case is made from brass and bronze, all gilded. The dials are made of silver and gilt brass. The movement is made from gilt brass and steel. The main dial has three rings to indicate the hour. The outer ring in French hours, I-XII, the hour system the US uses. The second ring is Italian time, 1-24 beginning at sundown, oddly enough the Jewish hour system. The inner, and most complex ring is Nurnberg hours, day and night hours that vary according to the season. It’s the ring that has a white section and a black section. These two sections expand and contract to give night and day their proper proportion of the 24 hour day.
The dial on the back is actually an astrolabe. It shows the apparent motion of 20 major stars visible in the Northern Hemisphere. It also shows the position of the sun and moon in the Zodiac as well as the phase of the moon and mean solar time. The decoration around the base represents the four seasons. It was given to the Met by J. Pierpont Morgan in 1917.
Lunch in the Met’s cafeteria was actually quite good and not really expensive if you consider that food on Manhattan is mostly outrageously priced.
After eating we headed straight to the Early European Painting section and, after inquiring about their exact location, went straight to the Caravaggio’s. They were conveniently located in the same corner of room 621. They are “The Holy Family with the Infant John the Baptist”, “The Lute Player” and “The Musicians”. To help identify him, the infant John the Baptist is already wearing his coat of skins. The Musicians is the most interesting of the three. It’s actually an allegory of music, showing three young musicians accompanied by Cupid on the left. The violinist in the foreground is reading some music, the lute player is tuning his instrument and between them at the back is a boy holding a horn. Much like Alfred Hitchcock would do in his films; this horn player is a self-portrait of Caravaggio. One painting by Benozzo Gozzoli, The Conversion so St Paul, clearly shows the period’s practice of representing Biblical figures in Medieval dress.
Then it was on to the display of musical instruments from around the world. Needless to say there were a lot of instruments I’d never seen before from Asia and Africa. The most interesting displays to me were the alto saxophone in E-flat made by Aldophe Sax, the instruments inventor. He started tinkering with the saxophone in 1838 but didn’t patent the final instrument until 1846. However several symphonic composers, Bizet, Rossini and Berlioz among them, scored for the instrument as early as 1844. That same year France added saxophones to its military bands followed by England and the USA in 1857. Aldophe’s fellow inventor John Phillip Sousa contributed to the instruments popularity. After WWI it became closely associated with jazz and dance bands. (My goal is to learn something new every day and that’s what I learned today.)
Then it was on to the impressionists. Despite the fact that my favorite painter is Caravaggio, my favorite period is the impressionists. The Met has a great collection of my favorites, Morisot, Renoir, Cezanne, Monet, Pissarro, Gauguin, van Gogh and Degas are all represented along with many other lesser known but very talented painters of the period. Monet’s famous time of day studies of the Haystack’s, Effects of Snow and Sun and Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunshine) are on display. Every general book on the Impressionists has several examples of these studies in it.
The most famous paintings are probably van Gogh’s ‘Portrait of a Man in a Straw Hat’, ‘Wheat Field with Cypresses’ or Renoir’s ‘By the Seashore’. Back to my theme of learning something every day. Today was a banner day in that area. The painting that really struck me was Gustave Courbet’s ‘Young Ladies of the Village’. It’s a fair size canvas that depicts a rural scene with green fields interrupted by what appear to be short, crumbling limestone cliffs. There are some cows in the field but the main action is a grouping of ladies right about where the lower horizontal third intersects the left vertical third. A spot on compositional statement. There are three ladies in obvious urban, Sunday dress to the right and a small girl dressed in plain country clothes to the left. The girl is holding a stick with a switch attached and is obviously tending the cows. One of the city ladies (actually Courbet’s three sisters) carrying a picnic basket is handing what appears to be a small loaf of bread to the girl, which she accepts with downcast eyes and a shy smile. The landscape and cows are very impressionistic in style while the group of women is more detailed. It has the look of a Photoshopped picture. The women are so clear and colorful. It’s striking and to my knowledge I have never seen it in any of the many books we have on the period.
The Met is a user friendly museum. Photos are ok without flash for the obvious damage to the art works reason. Artists can set up an easel and copy paintings. There were two copyists working today. Both were doing excellent work.
All too soon it was time to head to the hotel and get ready to meet friends for dinner. It just happens that they are arriving from California just as Diana and I are getting ready to board the QM2. We have arranged to meet at a restaurant after they call us and let us know they are at their hotel. Ken and Shirley are the longest term friends I have. We met while working at the May Company store in Redondo Beach while attending college. Shirley’s sister Carol and Ron are traveling with them. I’ve known Carol almost as long. It was a great dinner of NY style pizza, thin crust that is and in this case square, with good friends.
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