The Cloisters is a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art which houses the museum’s extensive collection of medieval European art and artifacts, including the noted Unicorn Tapestries. The museum’s buildings are a combination of medieval structures bought in Europe and reconstructed on-site stone-by-stone, and new buildings in the medieval style designed by Charles Collens. The museum owes its existence to philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who purchased the medieval art collection of George Grey Barnard, and gave it to the Met along with his own collection. The Met then had the Cloisters built in Rockefeller’s newly created Fort Tryon Park with endowment money from Rockefeller.
The Cloisters collection contains approximately five thousand European medieval works of art, with a particular emphasis on pieces dating from the 12th through the 15th centuries. Notable works of architecture include the Sant Miquel de Cuixà cloister, with an adjacent Chapter House; and the Fuentidueña Apse from a chapel in the province of Segovia (Castilla y León, Spain). The collection includes several ivory c 1300 Gothic Madonna ivory statuette, mostly French, with some English examples.
The museum contains the Flemish tapestries depicting The Hunt of the Unicorn,Robert Campin’s Mérode Altarpiece, and the Romanesque altar cross known as the Cloisters Cross, acquired under the curatorship of Thomas Hoving. The Cloisters holds a number of medieval illuminated books, including the Limbourg brothers’ Les Belles Heures du Duc de Berry and Jean Pucelle’s Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg. It holds the Cloisters set of fifty-two playing cards, the only complete set of ordinary playing cards from the fifteenth century.
Together, the park and the Cloisters are listed as an historic district on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. The Cloisters had been designated a New York City landmark in 1974, with Fort Tryon Park designed a scenic landmark in 1983.
