Middle Ages to Boston

"As you know," wrote Boston's late, fictional George Apley (J. P. Marquand's The Late George Apley) to his son John, "for a number of years I have been making a collection of Chinese bronzes. . . . I have made this collection out of duty rather than out of predilection, from the conviction that everyone in a certain position owes it to the community to collect something. . . . They will, of course, be left by my will to the Museum."

Nonfictional but equally conscientious Boston Brahmins have indeed made Boston's Museum of Fine Arts one of the world's great repositories of Oriental art, given it distinction in many another field. But no benefactor happened to hit on medieval art. Last spring the museum drew polite attention to this deficiency by adding to its staff white-haired, pink-cheeked, enthusiastic Dr. Georg Swarzenski, Nazi refugee and a top-notch authority on the Middle Ages. Last week Bostonians who floundered through Fenway snowdrifts to the museum found there the finest loan exhibition of medieval art ever assembled in the U. S.

World War II stopped projected borrowings from abroad. But Dr. Swarzenski effectively panhandled U. S. museums, dealers and collectors, even persuaded such a confirmed non-lender as J. P. Morgan to ship some treasures temporarily to Boston.

The Middle Ages is the term which proud Florentines of the Renaissance invented to describe the thousand years between what they considered the two periods of human perfection--classical times and their own--the era when art. like learning, was primarily an adjunct of the Church. Boston's show concentrates on the Middle Ages' last four centuries (up to 1400), when its biggest and best products were the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals which soared up all over Europe. Since it could not show this monumental architecture, the Boston Museum picked smaller objects to illustrate the basic medieval concept of art: a devotion which lavished technique and materials on the work in hand far beyond any practical need.

No orderly era was the Middle Ages. No orderly survey of it does the Boston Museum attempt to give, but a glamorous hodgepodge of a period when art and craftsmanship were more nearly one than ever before or since. Crammed into the show's seven galleries are tapestries, jewelry, coffers, chessmen, caskets, cameos, illuminated manuscripts, buckles, reliquaries, candlesticks, vestments, mirrors, rings, enamels, glass, pottery, textiles, Gothic sculpture, painting--from Norway to Byzantium.

Humor and fantasy are as characteristic of medieval art as piety and sound workmanship. All four merge in the series of aquamaniles which Dr. Swarzenski calls his zoo. Once used for ceremonial washing, these bronze ewers include centaurs, lions, horses, unicorns. One gryphon holds a small human figure in his mouth as faucet. Even George Apley would have collected them out of predilection rather than duty.

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