By HOLLAND COTTERFEB. 27, 2014
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‘Radiant Light’
CreditByron Smith for The New York Times
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With monastic masonry shipped in from Europe, an interior filled with liturgical luxe, and its air fragrant with spiritual expectation, the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval redoubt in Upper Manhattan, is a complete atmospheric package, and one of the city’s great examples of installation art.
The installation, like the medieval worldview, appears to be fixed but is open to fortuitous interventions, and there’s one on view now in the form of six large windows that seemed to have been beamed down from on high for “Radiant Light: Stained Glass From Canterbury Cathedral.”
Embedded in a sort of gray wood tower in the Romanesque Court at the Cloisters, the windows date from between 1178 and 1180. They are excerpts from what was probably once a set of 86 near-life-size ancestors of Jesus, images representing his male biblical genealogy, beginning with Adam and coming forward to King David, from whom Mary and Joseph are said to descend.
Recent structural repairs to the cathedral have required that certain windows be temporarily removed, presenting the opportunity for the six seen here — among the oldest known examples of English glass painting — to leave the precincts for the first time and travel, first to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and now to the Met, where their arrival puts a luminous cap on the Cloisters’ 75th anniversary year.
Medieval Christian religious art, like Christian theology, is based on a complicated interweaving of darkness and illumination. Church interiors were both sunk in shadow and saturated with light: sunlight filtering in through windows; candlelight glinting off gold vessels; halos radiating from images of saints. The idea that light penetrated glass but left it unbroken was taken as a symbol of the virgin birth. Churches were conceived of as truth-holding boxes of light, but also as power stations, feeding light into the world.
The original location of the Canterbury windows was pretty celestial: 60 feet up above the cathedral floor in the architectural register known as the clerestory. And the entire series seems to have been made in the late 12th and early 13th centuries for an extension of the church holding the shrine of a suddenly and sensationally popular saint, Thomas Becket.
Born in a London merchant family about 1118, Becket had risen to political power as a trusted favorite of Henry II, and as chancellor of England, he had supported the king’s effort to strengthen the authority of the throne against that of the Roman Catholic Church. But after being consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury, he had a shift in loyalties. Soon, he and Henry were locked in a secular-religious standoff.
When the situation grew dangerous, Becket exiled himself to France but then returned to Canterbury. There on Dec. 29, 1170, at Vespers, four knights, who may or may not have been acting on Henry’s orders, brutally cut him down. (In the medieval galleries of the Met downtown, you’ll find a vivid illustration of the scene etched on a small silver casket that may have been made to hold relics of Becket’s blood.)
The move to silence Becket backfired. With almost unheard-of speed, Rome declared him a saint. And even before that, literally from the night he was killed, he became a wonderworking cult object and his cathedral tomb a magnet for pilgrimage.
The ancestors of Jesus in the windows looked down on that tomb. Surely, they were meant to be seen as honoring Becket with their attention, encircling him within sacred history. At the same time, they may have conveyed a more seditious message. As revered progenitors dating back to humanity’s creation, they advertised a ruling line of far greater antiquity and spiritual legitimacy than that of the English throne.
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However the figures were interpreted by Canterbury visitors, they were imposing presences, even glimpsed from afar. And they are especially so at the Cloisters, where they are presented just above eye level and close up, the way the artists who made and placed them must have experienced them.
The six windows are the products of different glazing campaigns, though all date from near the beginning of the window project. And they include the work of different artists, the earliest, the so-called Methuselah Master, being the greatest. He is responsible for the portrait of Jared, representing the fifth generation since Adam.
Seated upright on a backless throne, Jared’s large-headed body self-confidently fills the arched space he occupies. According to Genesis, he lived to the age of 962; here, he looks to be in the prime of life. With his clear brow, curling beard, and large, amused eyes, he is regally dressed in gold and green and immaculately groomed, right down to his cleanly clipped nails.
The image of Lamech, the father of Noah, is attributed to the same artist but makes a different impression. He twists in his seat; his robe is unkempt; his face — probably a modern copy — is shaded by a pointed, broad-brimmed hat. He was considered an unheroic character, a member of the corrupt generation that triggered the Flood. The fact that his hat was associated with Jewish attire would not have been lost on a medieval audience.
The design for Noah’s portrait may have been drawn by the Methuselah Master, but the window itself, of cut, painted and soldered glass, was by others’ hands. Although Noah’s gestures are expansively personable, the scale of figure is small and marks the beginning of a second style at Canterbury, with various painters sharing the job.
The three remaining windows at the Cloisters, depicting Noah’s descendants Phalec and Thara, and Thara’s son Abraham, are likely all from this time, toward the end of the still-early 1178-80 phase. Bodies are face-forward and somewhat stiff, hand gestures generic and faces psychologically less distinctive. (Again, in the case of Abraham, the head is a 20th-century replacement.)
Yet there are also attractive special features. The arches above the figures support increasingly complex images of turreted towns, and there are nice sartorial touches: Phalec fastens his cloak with a fat amethyst brooch; Abraham wears snazzy yellow socks under baby-blue boots.
And in the Cloisters installation, organized by Timothy B. Husband, a curator in the museum’s medieval art department, two windows, those devoted to Thara and Abraham, are set up in their original configuration, one above the other, with both enclosed in a glorious, wide, trellis-and-pink-palmette border.
Consistent throughout all six windows is the high level of craftsmanship brought to an art form that was fundamentally about painting. Each translucent piece in the pictorial jigsaw is brushed with minute attention to detail — folds of cloth, tangles of hair, shadings of lips — and washed on both sides with ruby reds, midnight blues and marigold yellows. Add sunlight, and the color is like that in no other medium, so succulent and luscious you could almost taste it.
As it happens, in the Cloisters display, the windows are electrically lighted from behind, the only practical way they can be seen unchangingly throughout the day and at night. Yet a changing environment is part of their history at Canterbury.
The Becket shrine they once encircled is long gone, obliterated in the 16th century by another English king, Henry VIII. In the late 18th century, some windows in the sequence were placed elsewhere in the cathedral. Others — about half of the full set — have been lost over time to weather, war and accident.
And, inevitably, because human history is dynamic and chaotic, the meanings of the windows have altered. Today, the ancestors they immortalize, patriarch after patriarch, imbued with the politics and prejudices of another day, are not necessarily models to admire or personalities to love.
Yet taken as evidence of a medieval concept of history as a divine work of art eternally finished, even if humans could only see it as puzzle of darkness and light, the windows remain of interest. And as visual objects made from glass, paint and luminescence, retaining true luster 10 centuries on, they still deliver the disbelief-curing clout of miracles.
“Radiant Light: Stained Glass From Canterbury Cathedral” remains through May 18 at the Cloisters, 99 Margaret Corbin Drive, Fort Tryon Park, Washington Heights; metmuseum.org, 212-923-3700.
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