Penny: You missed a wonderful museum if you missed the art museum! Two years ago on a family trip we stopped to see the mansion on the free day (Monday, BTW), and on the way out I took a peep in the museum -- WOW! Look straight in the door and there is a GIGANTIC Rubens that just knocks your socks off. Well, mine anyway. Two crying kids meant it was time to head back, but the next year I planned an art museum trip!
I expected a small collection, but it's really wonderful. The Rubens is from a whole series of "cartoons" he did for a set of tapestries about the Eucharist prefigured in the Old Testament. I think the set is called "The Triumph of the Eucharist." There is one tapestry, which I thought was rather ugly, but there are about a half a dozen of these "throw away" cartoons, which are gorgeous paintings done on paper instead of canvas. There are rooms of medieval and renaissance stuff, and all sorts of other wonderful things. The funniest part was the descriptions of religious paintings. They were all written as if by someone faintly surprised at the whole idea of religious painting, and definitely someone who couldn't imagine that they had any religious significance NOW. "People used to think," "people then believed," etc. etc. The catalogue on the Triumph of the Eucharist is even worse. But it's a great museum and there are lots of pictures and sculptures that are of interest to this list's readers, being different from those you usually see. I didn't see the circus museum, though! That was supposed to be this year, but we aren't going :-( Gail Finke _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
