We are no strangers to free — parks without a parking fee, Costco samples, and museums that charge no admission.
Just two months after an extensive four-year renovation, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has had the audacity to open its doors to visitors without a single token required.
We began our Labor Day holiday excursion in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood with my son Jeff and his wife Becky. The Peabody Library was closed for construction. Darn. The Washington Monument wanted six dollars for Nancy and I to practice stair climbing. No way. But the Walters Museum had an open door. Thank you, patrons.
My first inclination was to find anything in the Walters about Spain, since we would be walking the Spanish Camino de Santiago in just a matter of days. I came up empty. Works from Italy, England, Egypt were plentiful. Asian art stood out beautifully, and the historic books, having been recently cleansed with cosmetic sponges, caught my attention instantly.
The museum collection resides an 1850s house, a piece of art itself. Before the recent renovation, curators learned that adhering to the usual museum standard for 50 percent humidity was actually damaging the house. So that changed. Each piece of art now has its own controlled environment. And some precious pieces of history have been digitized to be fully accessed.
So imagine my surprise when my son, who specializes in late medieval philosophy at Loyola University pulls up a 13th century manuscript by Peter Lombard, a French bishop from the twelfth century. The manuscript was beautiful. It was not just a pretty piece of art to Jeff. He began translating it, as he’s want to do. He’s all over those ancient manuscripts.
Lombard has quite the distinguished reputation, his work Four Sentences being the standard theology “textbook” for medieval universities for four centuries. Count ‘em — four centuries or 400 years.
So now I have found a link to Spain, where Lombard had an influence on the church and what was being taught in universities and passed on to the people for twenty-score years, yes, even in those cathedrals in Spain.
