Ground Floor of Musee National du Moyen Age
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Ground Floor of Musee National du Moyen Age
Seemingly the backdrop to the artefacts of display, the tapestries that hang in most rooms are in fact the highlight of the collection. In room 2, there’s an exquisite Resurrection scene embroidered in gold and silver thread, with sleeping guards in medieval armour and fourteenth-century embroidery of two leopards in red and gold. Scenes of manorial life are hung in room 3: these sixteenth-century Dutch tapestries are full of flowers and birds, and include scenes such as a woman spinning while her servant patiently holds the threads for her, a lover making advances, a woman in her bath which overflowing into a duck pond, and a hunting party leaving for the chase.
Room 5 holds attractively naïve wood and alabaster altarpiece plaques found in homes and churches all over Europe and produced in England by the Nottingham workshops. Adjacent (room 6) are some wonderful backlit fragments of stained glass from the Sainte Chapelle, moved here during the chapel’s mid-nineteenth-century renovation. It’s fascinating to see the workmanship close up, particularly in bizarre little scenes such as one Samson having his eyes gouged out.
Down the steps, in the modern structure built around the old baths, room 8 houses the 21 thirtheenth-century heads of the Kings of Judea from the west front of Notre-Dame, lopped off during the Revoulution in the general iconoclastic frenzy, and only discovered in a 1977 excavation near the Opéra Garnier. The blurred, eroded faces and damaged crowns of the Old Testament kings are lined up in a melancholy row of fallen nobility, next to a stage of headless robed figures. Arching over the frigidarium (room 9), the cold room of the Gallo-Roman baths, the vaults are preserved intact – though temporarily protected by corrugated sheets and scaffolding to enable a study to be carried out on the age of the bricks and plaster. They shelter two beautifully carved first and the second century capitals, the so-called Seine Boatmen’s Pillar and the Pillar of St-Landry, which has animated-looking gods and musicians adorning three of its faces. From the Roman baths it’s a smooth transition to room 10, with its (modern) vaulting and mainly Romansque works, notably two harrowing wooden Crucifixions. Three alarmingly fish-eyed heads, detached from the portals of the royal basilica at St-Denis, guard the entrance to room 11, with its Gothic sculptures of saints and biblical figures.
