Life is a State of Mind

We had a lovely weekend museum hopping in New York with La Belle Compagnie and enjoying the hospitality and cooking of Deb and Steve.

The museum hopping started at The Morgan Library and Museum where we got to see a Magna Carta on display. We spent a lot of time perusing the digital archive of two earlier exhibits on their information kiosks. Demons and Devotion: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves is fabulous and has many gorgeous illuminations created in about 1440. Zoom in on the following and count the medieval items you want to build:

• MS M.917, pp. 150–151
• MS M.917, pp. 146–149
• MS M.917, pp. 306–307

Illuminating the Medieval Hunt was also still online, and it is full of early images of hunting.

We had an excellent lunch at Woo Chon and then continued the museum hopping at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy (this exhibit is traveling and will be in Richmond in January, 2012 and is awesome for anyone interested in beautiful sculpture or 15th century clothing and accessories) and The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. We have big reproduction copies of the Belles Heures, but when you look at the original pages with a magnifying glass additional details pop out at you and become clear. The Limbourg brothers and their crew were amazing artists. I was also excited to catch Five Thousand Years of Japanese Art: Treasures from the Packard Collection and wandered through a few other exhibits for the fun of it.