Medieval beauty: The Cloisters, New York, US Part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of the most important museums of medieval art in the world could only have been created in 1930s America, as Jeremy Musson discovers

- Jeremy Musson

THE Cloisters is an outpost of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (‘the Met’) that sits in Fort Tryon Park, on the northern end of Manhattan Island in the US. There is nothing quite like the building, which was begun in 1935 and is still one of the world’s most memorable museums. It displays European medieval artworks, carvings, stained glass, tapestry, metalwork, earthenware and manuscripts in an immersive architectural evocation of the Middle Ages that could only have been designed in 1930s America.

Timothy B. Husband’s Creating The Cloisters (2013) offers an authoritative history of this remarkable building, which reassembles sections of four medieval cloisters, a chapter house and a Romanesque chapel to create a series of halls, courts and enclosed green gardens. Entering the museum, visitors embark on a progress through Romanesque and early- to late-Gothic architecture.

The design and construction of the building in its park setting were funded by John D. Rockefeller Jnr (d.1960), one of the foremost philanthropists of the 20th century, who gave away more than $537 million to such diverse undertakings as the National Parks service and Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, as well as, in France, the restoration of Versailles, Fontainebleau and the cathedral at Reims after the First World War. The Cloisters alone received about $16 million.