Musée de Cluny

The Musée de Cluny (alternately, the Musée national du Moyen Âge; wiki) is a lovely museum in the center of Paris, focusing on the middle ages and on the grounds of a Roman bath/abbey/garden. I enjoy museums and I enjoyed traversing this one on hard mode, with no personal concessions to English-translated guides or material.

Some of the illustrations seemed downright whimsical and modern in their styling, for example this image from a combat guide:

"Traité de combat" from "Tradition de maître Johann Lichtenauer, Augsburg, 1490-1500"

The museum ticket was printed with one of several randomly-selected works in the museum, providing a solo scavenger hunt. My ticket was a piece of the unicorn tapestries, although no unicorn bits made it into the clipped ticket frame.

Foreground: ticket. Background: original tapestry.

For part of my visit, I was delighted to be stuck a few meters behind a group of elementary-aged schoolchildren getting a guided educational visit. I learned some easter eggs to look for in stained-glass windows (one guy is winking! look, the camel is sticking out its tongue!) and also got to practice my "guess what that specialty historical word is" linguistic skills. Luckily the guide was excellent and provided simple-words explanations for everything. I tried to stay in earshot but not interfere with the herd.

Eventually the school group diverged and I continued my exhaustive, read-every-plaque grown-up museum visit. I spent a long time in this completely emptied and desacralized chapel, which was used as a dissection room (with observing medical students!), among many things, throughout the years.

This panorama does not really capture how mind-bendingly awesome the room is. But it tries.

 The stonework is really superb, gently curving in really precise geometric formations, with insets of different stonework curves. All completely symmetrical, at least from the floor and to the human eye. I'm curious what tools/templates/techniques were used to construct this, but of course for that we'd have to go over to my favorite Paris museum, the Musée des arts et métiers (wiki).

The stonework, carved vines and leaves and grapes and branches, even includes a scattering of snails, creeping their way along. I lingered in this room looking to find every single one (I'm sure I missed some).


This post's theme word is pleniloquence (n), "excessive talking." A solo visit to the museum is leisurely and absent any pleniloquence.