The Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages

A museum of the Middle Ages?  Really?  Now why would anyone want to go to one of them?  My sole reason for visiting was to see the ruins of the Roman baths that date from between the 1st and 3rd centuries.  That is the time period when Paris was a small outpost of the mighty Roman empire.  Not so small that it lacked for a sizable bath house. The ruins were mostly big rooms, but the ceilings, shown below, are pretty cool.

Frigidarium of Ancient Roman Baths, Cluny museum

There are also some small mosaics that were found in the ruins:

Mostly art and sculpture from the Middle Ages fails to interest me--the sculptures are rigid, the painting is flat looking, and is about themes I don't get excited about.  However, this museum has a couple of wonderful sculptures where the figures had such movement that you would have thought it was much later work, as is shown in this photo (taken from the web). The figures also retain a bit of paint which indicate that like the Greek sculpture of antiquity, stone sculpture in the Middle Ages was painted.

I also learned that Asian people aren't the only ones who do very intricate and lovely ivory carvings, something that appeared in Europe during the Middle Ages.

Of course, the great art of the Middle Ages was stained glass windows like those at Chartres and Saint Chapelle.  The Cluny museum has a lot of small sections of glass, including pieces from Saint Chapelle.  The nice part is that they are illuminated from behind, and you can stand with your nose 6 inches from the glass.

However, the biggest surprise for me was the tapestries.  I've seen lots of them in museums--they are usually dark, very elaborate scenes, and one can see why they were so popular in the Middle Ages and beyond.  Yet for me, they are only of mild interest.  That has changed with the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries dating from about 1500 at the Cluny.  There are six tapestries, varying a bit in size, but all probably 8 feet high and 12 feet or more wide.  Five of the panels represent a maiden and one of the five senses.  Always there is a unicorn in the tapestry and usually a lion.  The background is called mille fleurs, million flowers.  The sixth tapestry is less understood.  There is a banner saying "Mon Seul Desir" (my only desire), so how this relates to the other five has been speculated up endlessly.

The photos below are from postcards because it is not possible to take photos of these for concern of light damage.  They are hung in a room with fairly low lighting so photographing is difficult.

So what is so amazing?  The colors are astonishing, and the maidens each are lovely.  The theme of each piece is also intriguing for how it represents the sense.  The brocades of the maidens' dresses are still visible in the tapestry and each has trees that can be distinguished from their detail as apples, pines, maples, etc.  They are the loveliest wall hangings I have ever seen.  

The lady and the unicorn: Taste (Le Gout)

The lady and the unicorn: my only desire (Mon Seul Desir)

Go to the Cluny--these alone are worth the trip!

A Little Time in Italy: Prato and Venice

At the end of January I made a trip to Prato, which is near Florence.  While there I got a chance to see how robots for urban search and rescue are fairing in tests in a earthquake rescue scenario.  Here's a small robot (called an unmanned ground vehicle) at such a site, as well as the test site itself

Urban test site for search and rescue

One other fun aspect of this part of my trip was a visit to a restaurant in the Tuscan hills looking down on Florence.  Dinner was Italian time (started at 9 pm by which time I was ready to eat my hand), and it was a wonderful dinner.  After, at 11:30 pm, our hosts (the Italian Firebrigade, who are first responders in earthquake crises) told us we would take a short walk up the hill to the summer villa of the deMedici family, one of the great ruling families of Renaissance Italy.  So up we walked, past a hotel in the dark on a clear and starry night.  Well, was I surprised!   There was this huge villa (5 stories high), in perfect condition.  They turned on the lights so we could see it, not quite as clearly as illustrated in the photo below, but enough to see the whole building including the portico with intact Renaissance frescoes, which we saw by climbing up the stairs in the front of the building.

We were invited inside (at 11:45 pm no less) to see the wine cellars and old kitchen of the villa, complete with a roasting device invented by Leonardo DaVinci.  The wine in the cellars wasn't hundreds of years old;  the oldest label I saw was 1962--still pretty old!

After the meetings I attended, I took the train to Venice where Chuck met me for a three day stay in the city of canals.

As I walked out of the train terminal, I had that ah-ha moment:  Venice really has water in canals for streets!  There is NOWHERE in the city besides the car park at the train station where you can have a car.  No place to drive one at all.  Everyone has boats:  little row boats, boats with small or big motors, or gondolas or the city "buses" called vaporettos, which are in fact small ferry-type boats that move up and down the Grand Canal dropping people off at various stops.  If you want to go anywhere off the Grand Canal, you walk or find someone to take you in their boat.  We walked, as Venice really isn't that big and between vaporetto stops, it was easy to get places on foot.

Venice in late January is rainy, so rainy that the few tourists who are around stay covered.  That's why this photo of the famous Piazza San Marco is empty of people at 2 pm in the afternoon!

Piazza San Marco in the rain

The Grand Canal from the Rialto Bridge

Winter in Venice has one additional challenge: high water.  In Boston we have snow.  In Venice for 4 months of the year, there is high water at the two times a day when there is high tide.   That means water runs over from the canal onto the sidewalks around Venice--this does not happen in spring and summer for a variety of meteorological and astronomical reasons. The high water lasts for an hour or so around the high tide point.  Of our 3 days in Venice, each day had some high water, so that low areas had a few inches of water.  However, our first day had a very noticeable high tide, so much that the Piazza San Marcos, at one of the lowest points in the city,  at 10:30 am was inundated with 1 meter of water (that's up to my waist).  But by noon, it had subsided and that's when we went there!

High water on the sidewalk next to the canal

A Gate to hold back the high water from a cafe

Since I'm a museum goer, we went to three museums, the first being the museum in the Basilica of San Marco, high up in the Basilica.  On display there are the four horses of the Basilica, which date to Roman times.

These beautiful statues look as though they just might start prancing down the street.  They were stolen from Constantinople in around 1200!

Joaquin Sorolla: Sewing the Sails

The next museum we visited was the Ca' Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art, which houses art,  much of it Italian from Impressionism on.  The paintings I liked best I could not photograph, so below are the postcards of the paintings.  The Sorolla painting is really spectacular--about 6 feet high.

Kandinsky:  ZigZag White

We also spent a good afternoon at the Peggy Guggenheim museum of Modern Art.  Ms Guggenheim was a remarkable collector; her museum has wonderful works by Braque, Picasso, Pollack, Kandinski among others.  Two of my favorites are below:

Mare Ballerina: Severini

 Landscape with Red Spots: Kandinksy

Of course we also just wandered around, ate some good food (including wonderful hot chocolate that was like drinking a candy bar), bought some lovely paper goods and a pair of earrings.  Here's my cup of hot chocolate and me standing on a bridge:

My favorite event was a chance to see the opera at La Fenice, one of the oldest opera houses in Europe.  They performed La Clemenza di Tito, Mozart's last opera, which is not often performed, though it is a wonderful opera and was beautifully performed.   La Fenice is a very small opera house (less than 100 seats on the main floor).  Here's our view (taken before the opera began): 

Chuck and I asked another opera goer in our box to take a photo of us.  

All in all a visit to remember.