Bonjour!
Yesterday, continuing my tradition of visiting a different museum each Wednesday, I decided to visit the Cluny Museum, which specializes on artifacts from the Middle Ages. It's a fairly small museum right in the Latin Quarter, and part of the building is actually a ruin... Honestly, I didn't find it to be one of Paris's most thrilling museums, but they had a couple of nice collections of restored stained glass, and the chain mail was pretty cool! There was also a lot of religious art, of course--lots of wooden statues of the Virgin and the Holy Infant. And of course, they have the famous series of tapestries known as
La dame à la licorne, or the Lady and the Unicorn. There are six tapestries, each showing, shockingly, a lady and a unicorn (and there's usually a lion present as well). The first five tapestries are probably allegories, each representing one of the five senses, and the sixth is more mysterious... At any rate, the lion and the unicorn have very silly expressions in all of them--they look far too human. I think that's my favorite part about medieval art: so often the expressions on both animals and humans seem (unintentionally) silly. So if not the height of excitement, it was a nice little museum none the less.
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| The fence made it hard to get a good photo... but you can see the part out front is a ruin. |
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| The entrance is in rather better shape, and looks rather like a medieval castle, I thought. |
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