Reflections 6 - The Medieval galleries
It's astonishing and somehow humbling to realize how little of the Met's Medieval collection I've seen over the past weeks -- so much of it (the preponderance?) is at The Cloisters.
I feel a bit like a broken record as I write yet again about how much I am learning about what I don't know. But perhaps the most important thing I've come to realize is what an extended time period what we call "the Middle Ages" covers -- well over a millennium, longer than the Roman Empire -- and what a diversity of countries and cultures the term entails: from Byzantine Egypt to Viking Rus, from Celtic Gaul to Thomas-a-Becket's England.
What knits it all together is Christianity, and in this respect, at least, the iconography is far more familiar to me than that of Hinduism or Buddhism or Jainism. (For that matter, I can "read" a diptych showing scenes from the life of Christ more easily than I can read the Hebrew in an early -- or current-day -- machsor.) Yet I realize that I have never read either the Old or the New Testament, and that would be a good project to undertake. I have very little idea which of the scenes depicted have their origin in the Bible and which stem from other sources.
There is so much to know and to learn in the world; how does one even make a choice? I suppose at this time and this age I'm inclined to follow my interests and my instincts and what feels good, rather than what I "should" learn and know. So the Bible rather than calculus (a fancy of my pre-retirement days).
But there will be plenty to learn as I encounter my next set of galleries -- Africa, Oceania, and the Americas -- beginning with how to pronounce Oceania (where does the accent fall?)!
I feel a bit like a broken record as I write yet again about how much I am learning about what I don't know. But perhaps the most important thing I've come to realize is what an extended time period what we call "the Middle Ages" covers -- well over a millennium, longer than the Roman Empire -- and what a diversity of countries and cultures the term entails: from Byzantine Egypt to Viking Rus, from Celtic Gaul to Thomas-a-Becket's England.
What knits it all together is Christianity, and in this respect, at least, the iconography is far more familiar to me than that of Hinduism or Buddhism or Jainism. (For that matter, I can "read" a diptych showing scenes from the life of Christ more easily than I can read the Hebrew in an early -- or current-day -- machsor.) Yet I realize that I have never read either the Old or the New Testament, and that would be a good project to undertake. I have very little idea which of the scenes depicted have their origin in the Bible and which stem from other sources.
There is so much to know and to learn in the world; how does one even make a choice? I suppose at this time and this age I'm inclined to follow my interests and my instincts and what feels good, rather than what I "should" learn and know. So the Bible rather than calculus (a fancy of my pre-retirement days).
But there will be plenty to learn as I encounter my next set of galleries -- Africa, Oceania, and the Americas -- beginning with how to pronounce Oceania (where does the accent fall?)!
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