Le Musée du Moyen Age (Cluny)

Today after class, I found out that our afternoon meeting with Julien had been postponed  (sob), so I decided to see if I could visit the Musée Cluny with my student card. I walk by the Medieval Church in which the museum is concealed every day between my phonétiques and gramaire classes. Although the man at the ticket desk was a bit skeptical of my Sorbonne ID (which has my name misprinted as Monsieur Tyler Harvey), he eventually relented and let me in for free. Apparently my motive (to spend some quality time with 13th century tapestries and triptychs) was sufficiently transparent and I appeared innocent enough to gain entry. The beginning of the museum is an entirely deceiving disappointment. The configuration requires that visitors amble through room after room of Iraqi, Egyptian, and Syrian 12th century pottery before finding the real treasures tucked away in the back of the labyrinthine museum. The building is in fact a combination of the ruins of a Gallo-Roman bath from the ancient city of Lutéce (now Paris), and the transposed residence of the abbots of Cluny in Burgundy, which was moved to Paris by the head abbot in the 13th century. One of my favorite rooms is lit entirely by a concealed skylight, running along the back part of the ceiling, allowing light to filter through, decorating the statuesque fragments of Romanesque apostles (originating from the façades of Notre Dame and St. Denis). Although the museum seems to want to evade any sort of imposition of religious meaning, the spirituality of a room like this one truly constructs a weighty religio-historical context for the art works. My favorite piece, however, also happens to be the museum's rather understated treasure. Acquired in the 18th century, La Dame à La Licorne became most famous after George Sand described or made reference to the series of tapestries in several of her own works. There are 6 tapestries in all, the first 5 representing each of the five senses through the interactions of a central female, a lion, and a unicorn. The final tapestry is entitled À Mon Seul Désir, and pictures the woman removing her bijoux in a gesture of renunciation of all earthly pleasures for her sole desire, (to enrich her own soul), quite out of line with the sole desires of Parisian women today.  The tapestries were overwhelming in their sheer size, but also in their rich detail and poignancy. Before I left, I went in back to explore the incredibly kempt gardens, meticulously divided into about 12 plots. Each patch represents a Medieval value - my favorite was the garden of courtly love.