Treasures of the Walters Art Museum

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Eleanor Robbins gives a glimpse of Baltimore’s palace of art

One of the richest collections of mediaeval art in the United States, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore deserves to be better known, not only domestically, but to an international audience. For a decade or more, under a dynamic director and energetic staff, the museum has hugely increased its number of visitors. Its annual report lists dozens of volunteers who participate in the Museum’s effort to help viewers enjoy their discoveries, and works of art from the collection have been lent to museums all over the world, including the British Museum  last year for the exhibition ‘Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe’.

The Museum is clever at attracting US government and private philanthropic gifts to sponsor its exhibitions and publications (it lists a special grant writer on the staff list) and regularly produces guides to its own collections.  This book The Medieval World, the sixth in the series, is a finely illustrated general guide written in a narrative style giving just enough context for the reader to understand and appreciate the works of art before him. For the more knowledgeable reader, an annotated checklist gives full entries for each item (including provenance) and bibliographic listings for further study.

Although mediaeval art had been studied and admired off and on by antiquarians in Europe for some time, it was only at the end of the 18th and in the early 19th centuries that the culture of the Middle Ages began to be taken seriously. Beginning later, at the end of the 19th century in the USA, interest in Gothic Revival architecture led to a more-or-less scholarly concern for mediaeval artefacts.  In Boston, Isabella Steward Gardner built a Venetian Gothic palace in the 1890s and then furnished it with a collection of objects acquired overseas (now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum). Following Gardner’s lead, three other Americans, John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), Henry Walters (1848–1931) and George Grey Barnard (1863–1938) were the three major collectors who devoted their time, energy and financial resources to collecting art of this period.

In Baltimore, between the years of 1858 and 1894, William Thompson Walters (1819–94) had amassed a large collection of porcelain and paintings. Henry, his son, had often accompanied his father on buying trips and sometimes acted as his father’s agent, but it was only after his father’s death that he himself started adding to the collection, filling in some neglected areas.

To house the collection and make it more accessible to the public Walters hired a fancy New York architect to build an Italian Renaissance palace modelled after a palazzo in Genoa.  It had a central courtyard with period rooms, one of which was dedicated to the Middle Ages. Photographs from the 1930s show ‘an assortment of Gothic items’ in a wood-panelled room suitably furnished with reproduction ‘authentic medieval’ display cases filled with statuettes, reliquaries and ivory pieces.

Many of the objects are still part of the collection but some have been found to be, as it were, ‘less than genuine’ having been purchased by Walters at a time when contemporary collectors were more attracted to the so-called ‘Neo-Gothic style’ rather than the virtues of historical certitude. Walters himself recognized that some of his more treasured pieces were what were called ‘compositions … in the style of…’ for example, and even now the Museum’s conservation department is sometimes involved with matters of authentication before restoration.

The introductory chapter, aimed at the general reader new to the period, begins cautiously with terminology: the term ‘Middle Ages’ is ‘the era in European history spanning the fourth to the sixteenth century’; it is a period which  ‘lacks a clearly defined beginning and end’. Then there follows a short historical discussion  of major developments in the East and West, some cautionary remarks about the ‘romanticized’ retelling of the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood  and explanation for the stylistic terms of ‘Romanesque’ and ‘Gothic’.  In the chapters that follow the authors use objects from the Walters collection to illustrate ‘some significant characteristics of medieval art’. We read that the works chosen for description, discussion and illustration are ‘a small selection of the museum’s holdings’.

The collection comprises a large range of works of art, including limestone and alabaster sculpture (one of the St Denis heads and a few capitals from the tops of columns), jewellery and ornaments (Byzantine and also western European brooches and pins), metalwork, reliquaries, caskets and enamels, manuscripts and ivories.  The manuscripts, looked after by a special curator and assistants, have, over the years, attracted much publicity. An image in the Carolingian Gospels shows the Evangelist John who, the author says, is: ‘in a frenzy of divine inspiration, his pen running rapidly’. Another forms a full-page illustration of the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket from the Carrow Psalter of c.1250 (Carrow was a Benedictine house in Norwich).  The collection also owns (but not shown here) illustrations which must have been taken from whole books and, worse, single initials cut out from the pages, a sad  but frequent occurrence well-known to collectors. 

There are many examples of enamels, which were more or less mass-produced at workshops in or near Limoges in France.  Starting in the 12th century Limoges became an important centre for the production of metalwork for liturgical use. These colourful enamels and the interesting reliquary cross (illustrated on the front cover of the book) which was produced somewhere in the Meuse Valley in the mid-twelfth century are some of the best examples of metalwork from the mediaeval period. The cross is unusual in that, instead of the Four Evangelists that are normally shown, it is decorated with  four Virtues;  Hope, Faith, Obedience and Innocence, the vows of a monastic community. Visitors to the 2010 exhibition called ‘Treasures of Heaven: Saints. Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe’ whether they were in Cleveland, Baltimore or London, would have seen this very reliquary cross.

The Medieval World: The Walters Art Museum by Martina Bagnoli and Kathryn Gerry is published by the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD,  USA in association with D. Giles, Ltd. London, 2011. 216 pp. fully illustrated. ISBN  978 1 904832  96  6 (hardback)