Description of the attraction
The Paris Medieval Museum, located in the center of the Latin Quarter, is briefly called the Cluny Museum. The reason is simple: it is housed in the Cluny mansion. The Baths of Cluny are part of the 15th century mansion - the ruins of a bath complex from the Gallo-Roman era.
The combination of such different eras in one museum reflects the history of the building: the mansion traces its ancestry to the Roman baths of the 2nd-3rd centuries, on the foundations of which the monastery was built. The Cluny mansion itself was added to the monastery in the 14th century. It is a striking example of the civil architecture of medieval Paris, where you can find elements of both the Gothic and the Renaissance.
At first, the mansion was part of the Cluniac College building complex. It acquired its present form around 1500. After the death of Louis XII, his widow Maria Tudor lived here, then the future Cardinal Mazarin. During the revolution, the building was confiscated by the state. In a Gothic chapel, a doctor who settled here opened corpses. In 1833, the collector Alexandre du Sommera housed a collection of medieval and Renaissance rarities here. After his death, the collection was bought by the state. Du Sommer's son became the first curator of the newly formed museum.
Today, sculptures of the XII-XIII centuries, tapestries, stained-glass windows, miniatures, items of medieval life are exhibited here. Sculptures with a tragic history are also exhibited. During the revolution, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris was closed, Robespierre ordered to decapitate the statues of the Old Testament kings from the facade of the cathedral. The heads of the kings were found only in 1978 during the renovation of the Bank for Foreign Trade. Stone bodies were also discovered a year earlier. During the revolution, they were bought by a Parisian "for the foundation" - in fact, he buried the statues with honors and erected his house over them. Now the originals of the statues are in the Cluny Museum.
Of the other exhibits, six magnificent tapestries "The Lady with the Unicorn" are of particular interest. In front of the museum there is a wonderful garden, created in 2000 according to the canons of the Middle Ages. There is, for example, a medical garden where medicinal plants are grown.
