An epic adventure through time: New 1916 galleries at Cleveland Museum of Art ...
Most of all, you'd be told spades and shovels biting the mould, in which owners of many objects buried them, perhaps to send them into everlastingness with the bodies of loved ones or to lie low them from invading armies.
The eight new galleries, which unconcealed Saturday, bring the museum's eight-year, $350 million spread and renovation to the halfway point in terms of construction. Artistically, they do an superb job of showing off hundreds of sculptures, ceramics, liturgical objects and architectural fragments, all of which have been stored since construction began five years ago or loaned to other museums around the people.
Configured to feel like a dozen personal rooms, the galleries telescope more than 5,000 years of magnanimous history and take visitors on voyages in rhythm and space, from Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C., to medieval France and Germany around 1200 and to sub-Saharan Africa about 100 years ago.
The installations variety in visual approach from a subtle evocation of a cryptlike niche in a Byzantine-era church, with a processional irascible and an altarpiece, to a luminous display of African art presented fully as an exquisite aesthetic experience.
