deaths by fire, at the Met and elsewhere
A torso hangs on the wall. Plaques explain destruction and salvage, how these objects and stones were collected from throughout Europe, from buildings sacked in the 15th century or in the Spanish Civil War. The centuries collapse: ca. 1100 next to 15th-16th century and later. Painted wood sculptures are set about the room like driftwood gathered from some imaginary shore. The plaques give nameless artists names: attributed to the Master of Pedret; attributed to the Master of Rousillon. A plaque says other objects from the church disappeared entirely. It is a museum of effacement filled with broken bodies. It is Friday and I keep walking back into the Late Gothic Hall to look at the painted faces of the drowned men that a saint is slowly bringing back to life.
The Met Cloisters was founded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who inherited the Standard Oil fortune from his father, the richest man in American history. Rockefeller, Jr., donated the property, as well as a large art collection, to the Metropolitan Museum in 1931. The Cloisters, which opened to the public in 1938, incorporated medieval buildings into its designs: its architect traveled to Europe, modeling his plans on chapels and churches in France. It also literally incorporated them: doors, windows, columns, and walls from dismantled buildings have been embedded in this new one. At first, it may all seem like an art hoard or eccentric history project (Rockefeller, Jr., after all, was the man behind Colonial Williamsburg). But there is something fascinating in its approximations, its bricolage of an idea of Europe.
Many medieval collections are drab and uninteresting, stashes of armor and dead Christs and fading cloth. The Met Cloisters, on the other hand, is a dizzying place. Painstakingly “authentic,” the museum is a fabrication: ruins from different regions, made centuries apart, are assembled into chapels and rooms. It creates a feeling not that history is crowded and inexhaustible but that it is incoherent and mostly missing. The present takes on a kind of stillness in the void of all that past. While I was there, a woman tended to one of the gardens. A visitor meditated on a bench. An old couple stooped to look at carved figures set in the walls. I drank coffee in its gardens while retirees spoke of bread, wine, trips they’d made to Italy.
The drowned men in the Late Gothic Hall are painted on a large 15th-century retable depicting scenes from the life of St. Andrew. A few panels over, a “wicked mother” perishes in heavenly fire. I can’t find out anything about the legend online. Andrew’s hand points to a fiery cloud hovering above the woman. The bystanders, for the most part, look apathetic or mildly bothered. The woman looks resigned, her hands thrown up less in anguish than resignation. The fire is no column or conflagration, but comes in fan-shaped plumes of orange that fall like feathers from the ceiling. The room is crowded with onlookers waiting around for her to die.
Rockefeller, Jr., magnanimous in his philanthropy, was also blamed for orchestrating violence against those who worked at the sites of his fortune’s extraction. In April 1914, striking coal miners in Colorado were attacked by state militias and private guards, who doused the miners’ tents in oil and shot at them. Men, women, and children were killed. In the anarchist magazine Mother Earth, Julia May Courtney wrote that “for twenty-four hours the bodies lay crisping in the ashes, while rescuers vainly tried to cross the firing line.”
The same day I visited the Cloisters, a climate activist from Colorado set himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court building to protest inaction on climate change. Though it appears he had planned his death months ago, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has shown willingness to consider greatly restricting the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions.
Four Aprils ago, a Brooklyn attorney set himself on fire in Prospect Park, also in protest over climate change; his note called the act “my early death by fossil fuel.” He volunteered at a compost site in Brooklyn. He was 60 years old.
I run past that spot every week, where a small commemorative grove of trees now grows. Yesterday, there were still no leaves on the trees. Soon there will be, of course, as the weather turns hot and then hotter. Before long they will fall. Softly, like small fans of fire.
ben tapeworm