- Upcoming Events

Spring Trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
April 17, 2010

The Barony of Concordia of the Snows will be hosting an Arts and Sciences research bus trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, on April 17, 2010. We will taking a charter bus, from Crossgates Mall in Albany, down to the museum and back. The bus holds 55, and seats are $30. Checks should be made payable to Robin Hackett and are due by April 10th. The trip is open to members of the Barony of Concordia of the Snows, our neighboring groups and friends, and even family and/or students if they are interested. It's a big bus, after all. So, if people from neighboring SCA groups wish to drive to Albany to join in the trip, they are welcome to come.
For those who can, please cross post this to any of our SCA neighbors.

And now…..for the details of the trip…

There are four special exhibits open on this day that may be of interest to Scadians. Full summaries from the MMA site are at the bottom of the announcement. Epic India: Scenes from the Ramayana may interest eastern folk. The Drawings of Bronzino will interest scribes and 16th Century devotees, alike. Can you say Medici and Eleanor of Toledo? Wow! Medieval Tomb sculptures of the Duke of Burgundy, a nephew of the famous Duc de Berry will be on display, as a related exhibit to the main attraction. Yes, the Duc de Berry hours are unbound and on display, for what is possibly, one time only. Anyone who has ever admired the scrolls given in our courts will want to see this for themselves.

The bus will leave from Crossgates Mall 4/17/10 at 7:30am. We will make one stop on the way down. Our bus will drop us off less than a block from the museum. We will be picked up at 5pm, near the museum, where the bus driver is allowed. We will be informed before we get off the bus in the morning. Lunch is on your own, but in April you're pretty much left with what the museum offers.
Don't forget to leave time for the gift shop!
We will make a rest area stop on the way home so people can get some dinner if they choose. We will return to Crossgates Mall between 8-9pm.
This is a first reserved, first to ride trip. You must send me the following information to reserve your space:
SCA name
Legal name
Your cell phone number (if available), in case of an emergency on the trip
Off site emergency contact name/phone number

Email me the information at rhackett at nycap dot rr dot com. Please us the subject line "NYC
trip". You can pay me in person, or by mail, to: Robin Hackett 1017 Parkwood Blvd. Schenectady, NY 12308
Reminder: Payment is due by April 10th. Cash or check accepted. If we wind up with a waiting list, any unpaid seat will be offered to the next in line, starting April 11th.

Any questions should be directed to me.

Baroness eLeri

The Drawings of Bronzino
January 20, 2010–April 18, 2010
Galleries for Drawings, Prints, and Photographs, 2nd floor

This exhibition is the first ever dedicated to Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572), and will present nearly all the known drawings by, or attributed to, this leading Italian Mannerist artist, who was active primarily in Florence. A painter, draftsman, academician, and enormously witty poet, Bronzino became famous as the court artist to the Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and his beautiful wife, the Duchess Eleonora di Toledo. This monographic exhibition will contain approximately 60 drawings from European and North-American collections, many of which have never before been on public view.
Accompanied by a catalogue, authored by a team of international scholars, to be published by the Metropolitan Museum.
The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi and the Polo Museale Fiorentino, Florence.

The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry
March 2, 2010–June 13, 2010
Robert Lehman Wing

The Belles Heures (1405–1408/9) of Jean de Berry, a treasure of The Cloisters collection, is one of the most celebrated and lavishly illustrated manuscripts in this country. Because it is currently unbound, it is possible to exhibit all of its illuminated pages as individual leaves, a unique opportunity never to be repeated. The exhibition will elucidate the manuscript, its artists—the young Franco-Netherlandish Limbourg Brothers—and its patron, Jean de France, duc de Berry. A select group of precious objects from the same early fifteenth-century courtly milieu will place the manuscript in the context of the patronage of Jean de Berry and his royal family, the Valois.

The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy
March 2, 2010–May 23, 2010
Medieval Sculpture Hall

The renovation of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon provides an opportunity for the unprecedented loan of the alabaster mourner figures from the tomb of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, and his wife, Margaret of Bavaria. Each of the statuettes is approximately sixteen inches high. They were carved by Jean de La Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier between 1443 and 1470 for the ducal tomb originally in the church of Champmol, and they follow the precedent of the mourner figures carved by Claus Sluter and colleagues for the tomb of Duke Philip the Bold (1384–1410). The tombs are celebrated as among the most sumptuous and innovative of the late Middle Ages. The primary innovation was the space given to the figures of the grieving mourners on the base of the tomb, who seem to pass through the real arcades of a cloister.
The installation at the Metropolitan will be supplemented by related works from the Museum's collection, including the monumental Enthroned Virgin from the convent at Poligny (established by John the Fearless and Margaret of Bavaria) that was carved by Claus de Werve.
Accompanied by a catalogue.

Epic India: Scenes from the Ramayana
March 31, 2010–September 19, 2010
Florence and Herbert Irving Galleries for the Arts of South and Southeast Asia, 3rd floor

Among the themes most favored for Indian miniature painting are episodes from the great Indian epic the Ramayana. This classic of early Indian literature is infused with mythology and the legendary exploits of the gods, but above all tells the story of Lord Vishnu in his earthly appearance as Rama, a divine-king revered as the embodiment of nobility and virtue. The mythology of Rama provides the subject matter for an important genre of Indian paintings, and a selection of such works will be exhibited here, along with sculptures and a newly acquired spectacular painted cotton textile depicting a scene from the epic.

Also of possible interest (ok, it interests me)

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage
February 2, 2010–May 9, 2010
The Howard Gilman Gallery

Sixty years before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early twentieth-century, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage in the 1850s and 1860s. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. Such images, often made for albums, reveal the educated minds as well as the accomplished hands of their makers. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these images stand the rather serious conventions of early photography on their heads. The exhibition will feature approximately 55 works from public and private collections.
Accompanied by a catalogue.

Wars of the Roses
May 28-31, 2010
direct link to WOR web site