Stone by Stone

It sometimes seems as if the most valuable characteristic a museum man can have is an insistent, resourceful, patient diplomatic, dedicated pigheadedness. Last week, when Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed its latest acquisition to the public--a superb, 800-year-old limestone apse that had been brought from Spain to be reconstructed at the Met's medieval offshoot, The Cloisters--it ended a task of determined negotiation that began back in 1935. The Spanish ambassador and New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller were on hand to say a few glowing words, but neither even mentioned the painful process a great museum must sometimes go through to get a coveted treasure.

The apse first came to the Met's attention when John D. Rockefeller Jr returned from France in 1935 with a haphazard collection of photographs of medieval works that an agent had wished on him in Paris. In those days The Cloisters, Rockefeller's great gift to the Met, had not yet been built, but plans tor it were nearly complete. It was to be, and now is, a museum overlooking the Hudson River from a ridge at Manhattan's northern tip, a building designed in such a way that parts of antique castles churches and monasteries could be incorporated into it. Among the photographs that Rockefeller brought back was one of a ruined apse that the Paris agent said was French and could perhaps be purchased for The Cloisters."

No Sale. Rockefeller turned the photograph over to Medievalist James J. Rorimer, who was later to be director of The Cloisters and now runs the whole Met Rorimer set out for Paris, and after months of questioning and searching, he found that the apse was not in France but in the tiny village of Fuentiduena 45 miles north of Segovia. There it had once been part of a church dedicated to St. Martin (316-397), the great Bishop of Tours whose cult had spread from France to Spain. Though the apse was nothing but a shell exposed to the weather and was not even pictured in a single Spanish book on architecture, the government maintained that it was a national monument. That meant: no sale.

It was not until 1947 that a Spanish art dealer happened to bring up the subject of the apse again. Rorimer went to the site and decided that the apse was something that The Cloisters had to have. With the help of the U.S. embassy, he began negotiations. After ten years, the government agreed to "lend" the apse to The Cloisters if the Met in turn would buy six Spanish frescoes to "lend" to the Prado and undertake the restoration of another church in Fuentiduena. The Bishop of Segovia agreed to the transaction, after clearing it with the Vatican.

Pack & Preserve. The dismantling took five months. Every part of the apse was measured, every stone numbered and painstakingly packed in boxes. At The Cloisters, the stones were treated with a secret preservative to protect them against the cold, rain and city smoke. In January 1959 workmen began laying the foundation stones, at first without mortar, to test their fit to the new site. After corrections for the contours of the old site and for the distortions caused by centuries of settling, the walls slowly rose, set this time in a thin layer of mortar. When they reached the high narrow windows, everything fitted perfectly.

No one knows what great nobleman built the apse. It must have been part of a castle, church or chapel that loomed over a once thriving town. Most of the tiny sculptures that decorate it are still intact, but the fresco that presumably brightened the interior was long since washed away. The Cloisters was not dismayed: it already owned a magnificent fresco of a seated Madonna painted by the 12th century Master of Pedret. The fresco was a bit small, but once set in the new apse, it seemed perfectly at home. After 26 years The Cloisters had its golden treasure at last, almost as it must have been eight centuries ago.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.