Untitled

Abstract

The past teachesThe Cloisters Museum in Fort Tryon Park, New York contains more than 5,000 pieces of medieval domestic and religious art and represents the finest collection of Byzantine to early Renaissance masterpieces outside of Europe. Artwork had been originally collected by the eccentric American sculptor George Grey Barnard (1863Barnard ( -1938 and sold to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (JDR) in 1925 who envisioned a grand residence in the medieval tradition to permanently house these treasures. The grounds were designed by Frederick Olmsted, Jr. and the building, designed by Charles Collens , incorporates designs and actual physical elements from French abbeys purchased, transported across the Atlantic, and reassembled in New York in the 1930s. Stained glass roundels were popular elements of many religious and secular windows as they were fairly easy to construct and install, and could be more easily replaced then the intricate glasswork involving hundreds of individually soldered pieces. The New York collector Roy G. Thomas sold a number of Upper Rhineland roundels from German c. 1480-1490 abbeys to JDR including a series on the life of Jesus. This month's cover of the International Journal of Urologic History features the "Roundel with Circumcision" and the abbreviated inscription "Nunc dimittis [[se]r[v]um tuu[m] d[omi]ne" or "Lord, you release your servant" [Luke 2:29]. The roundel is installed in the resplendent 'Glass Gallery' overlooking the Bonnefont Cloister facing the southern. Artwork depicting the circumcision of Jesus was a popular motif throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe, one of which is featured in the article by Lutnick et al. exploring early uses of anesthesia. The inset to the left reveals that at even at a diameter of just over 7 inches, the unknown artist is still able to portray the expansive subtleties of human Foreward