14. Two columns from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, near
15. Cloister from the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa (Sant Miquel de Cuixà) recon-
Perpignan, France (and one, in the rear, from Saint-
structed at The Cloisters. Catalonia, ca. 1130 – 40. Marble, 90 x 78 ft. (27.4 x 23.8 m). The Metropolitan
Guilhem-le-Désert), displayed in the garden of
Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1925 (25.120.398 – 954)
Pierre-Yon Vernière in Aniane, before 1906
angel in its flight from earth, a thousand pinions rushing
a woman, every penny of it, than let yourself be fleeced like
heavenward. Almost it left the earth, in the glorious triumph
a simpleton, buying these things that look more like cuts out
of lightness and spiritual glory of Gothic architecture.”
o’ Foxe’s Book of Martyrs than Originals of the Old Masters
Barnard’s Cloisters gave substance to his “Gothic dream,” cre-
for a Gentleman’s Gallery.”
ating a paean to the Gothic sculptors he so revered. Barnard
The senior Raycie was referring to Actes and Monuments,
wished his monument to be an inspiration to young artists
the martyrology John Foxe published in 1563 that describes,
and a soul-enhancing experience for visitors. And for a pass-
often in grim detail, the deaths of saints from the year 1000
ing moment it was.
to his own day, with particular attention given to the Protes-
Prior to the opening of Barnard’s “cloisters museum”
tant martyrs who suffered under the persecutions of Queen
medieval art had little resonance with American audiences,
Mary in the 1550s. The vivid language was calculated to incite
an observation Edith Wharton addressed in False Dawn, which
Elizabethan hatred of Spain and the Inquisition. Initially
she published in 1924 as the first in the series called Old New York, four novellas each chronicling some aspect of upper-class New York society during a single decade beginning in the 1840s and continuing through the 1870s. Set in New York of the 1840s, False Dawn tells of Halston Raycie’s son, Lewis, who at the age of twenty-one is sent off on a two-year Grand Tour of Europe with his father’s mandate (and $5,000) to bring home “a gallery of Heirlooms . . . , a Domenichino, an Albano, a Carlo Dolci, a Guercino, a Carlo Maratta — one or two of Salvator Rosa’s noble landscapes.” Under the influence of a young Englishman whom he met in Switzerland, however, Lewis’s eyes are opened to the rarified world of Italian quattrocento paintings, and it is with crates of these that he returns to his family. Once Halston Raycie comprehends — for he certainly cannot discern — that
16. Capitals and columns removed from the monastery of Saint-Michel-de-
his son has brought home not old masters but “primitives,”
Cuxa in about 1840 and reinstalled in Les Bains de Saint Michel, Mme
he unleashes a tirade: “I am no blue-nosed Puritan, sir, and I’d a damn sight rather you told me you’d spent the money on
Baladud de Saint-Jean’s bathhouse at Prades. These elements, purchased by Barnard, were given to the French nation and eventually returned to the monastery.
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