Musée de Cluny [antikvár]

The "Musée de Cluny"The Musée de Cluny and the Musée des Thermes have the rare merit of being situated in buildings that are in complete harmony with the collections which they house. This association was the result not of chance, but of an intention which took almost a century to realize. Indeed, what better place to exhibit the great vestiges of ancient Paris than the Gallo-Roman baths (thermae), and what more perfect setting than the Gothic hőtel of the Abbots of Cluny for one of the richest collections of Medieval art in the world. It was with the re-organization of the museum after the Second World War that this harmonious ensemble was finally brought to completion.The buildingsThe BathsThe Gallo-Roman Thermae are one of the most impressive monuments left by the ancient occupants of Lutetia, as Paris was then called. At the time it was divided into two agglomerations: the first, nestled on the lie de la Cité, was surrounded by a protective wall in the 3rd century; and the second, established by the Roman conquerors on the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve, was grouped on the hillside running down to the Seine. Between them were the great river and also marshes which extended to the present-day boulevard Saint-Germain. In Antiquity, the public buildings were located towards the south: the forum under the present-day rue Soufflot, near the southern baths; the eastern baths on the site of the College de France, and the northern baths at the intersection of the boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel.The building here was constructed on a platform of beaten earth to the South, and over a cellar on the North side to compensate for the slope of the terrain. The architect designed it according to a rectangular plan of dimensions (100 m X 65 m) similar to those of the Thermae of Cher-chel, in Algeria, but far from the scale of those at Trier (170 m X 100 m). Excavations carried out in the 19th century under the careful supervision of Théodore Vacquer and then after the Second World War by Paul-Marie Duval have made it possible to reconstitute the original floor-plan and disposition of the three rooms: the Frigidar-ium, which is entirely intact, the Tepidarium, and the Caldarium, both in ruins, all of which were interconnected in a fixed order. There was another roomtoday occupied by rooms IX and X of the museum