Those not so Dark Ages The New York Times today has an
enthusiastic story about the “newly restored and reinstalled
Gallery for Western European Medieval Art from 1050 to 1300.”
Three key paragraphs: The brimming, light-flooded presentation
has been orchestrated by Peter Barnet, curator in chief of the
museum’s medieval art department and the Cloisters, his curators
and the museum’s designers. They seem to have wanted to mount a
final assault on the notion of the medieval period as backward,
antiquated or benighted. This misconception started in the full-
of-itself Renaissance, which condescendingly christened the
previous era the Dark or Middle Ages. Medieval, as the
Enlightenment tagged it, only sharpened the bite. With an effect
that is at once artistic, archaeological and devotional, this
gallery recasts medieval art as a mammoth, busy and fast-moving
project translating the Holy Scriptures into visual form, making
them accessible to largely illiterate populations. It resulted
in a free-for-all of constant