So we all knew this already...

Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2005
9:43 AM

...but I'm an art snob.

LauraSiobhan, Kevin and I went to the Walters on Saturday to catch the exhibit on Italian manuscripts before it closes on Jan. 8. It was a nice little show, with some lovely pieces and a few unusual ones. Emphasis on little, only one room and it took us maybe an hour to go through it (including time spent in the room geared toward kids - map on the wall of various milestones of human communication, complete with cute cartoon animals. There were also other display items like pigments, scribal tools, bookbinding stuff, etc.)

So we had lunch and then decided to go through the permanent medieval and Renaissance collections. Let me say I was... underwhelmed. Now, I'll admit, the large museums I've been to most recently have been the National Gallery, the Uffizi, the Palazzo Pitti and the Bargello. So possibly I'm a bit spoiled. But the Walters collection seemed a bit, how shall I say, second-rate. I've looked at a lot of Italian art, and I'm familiar with some artists that could be classified as obscure. But there were many pieces by artists I'd never heard of, and they were not masterpieces by any stretch. I could deal with that, since most of the pieces were collected by one guy at the turn of the twentieth century and clearly were the best he could get his hands on. Just as clearly, he didn't know squat about them.

Like I said, I could deal with that, but it seems like the curators at the Walters didn't know much about them either. The informational tags next to each piece frequently had incomplete, misleading, or just plain wrong information. An embroidered altar cloth was proclaimed to use linen thread with silver wrapped around it, to which I thought, "Huh. I would have thought silk instead of linen." Then at the bottom of the tag where it lists materials, it said Silk and metal thread on linen ground. Uh, yeah.

Anyway, we had a good time, enjoyed the manuscripts, and found a few really nice pieces in the permanent collections, but overall I was not terribly impressed. It's nice to have real, medieval things nearby to go see, but as I said, most of them were not what I'd call masterpieces.

After coming home from Baltimore, we had dinner at Fudd's and then home to (wait for it) build the crib! I supervised from the glider while Kevin and Laura did the actual work. I was a bit annoyed to find that the crib we'd gotten had apparently been returned to the store by someone else, because of a crack in one of the endposts. By the time we figured that out, we had most of it put together and neither of us felt like taking it apart, boxing it back up and returning it. It's not a big deal, we can glue it and nobody'll be able to tell the difference, but I'm annoyed with Babies R Us for selling us a damaged piece - can't figure out why it didn't go back to the manufacturer for a refund.

I do have pictures of the delicate operation, but they need to be resized, so check back here later and I'll get them added.