NARRATOR: In this little cloister, called the Trie cloister, you can sense the combination of shadow and light, shelter and exposure to the sky. If you're here in warm weather, the flowers are blooming, in an informal garden modeled on images like the Unicorn tapestries. You can hear the water of the fountain, and the sounds of the café. The cloisters of the middle ages too, of course, were once full of human activity.

Take a look at the columns. The many different colored marbles create a rich effect, and the white marble blocks on top are all carved differently. Some of the bases have engaging details too: near the spot where you entered, on the base below a pink pair, there's the head of a beast with another animal in its mouth.* The next pair has a monster with wings and a face on its chest, pitted against a hero armed with a club and shield. Continue walking, and around the corner you'll find sacred subjects: the first one in the row depicts the birth of Jesus, with his mother Mary lying on a bed that spans the space between the columns. In the middle ages, it would not have been uncommon to mix sacred themes with worldly ones, but when these elements were installed here, they were separated in the different arcades. We know nothing of the way they were arranged in the cloister for which they were made, because it was destroyed in the sixteenth century in a bout of violent iconoclasm, the fate of many fine monastic monuments.