40mm of The Cleveland Museum of Art

All work and no play makes Andy a dull boy.  That's why I'm on vacation from "the day job" this week.  Instead of driving hours to go somewhere and live in a hotel at night, we decided to stick close to home this year and take in some local fun.

I also decided that I didn't want to carry the whole camera bag around with me, so the choice was made to stick with the 40mm lens once again and only use that to capture our explorations.

Today's adventures led us to Cleveland to once again visit the Cleveland Museum of Art.  I love this place.  I especially love the ancient and Christian era artifacts that they have there.  Being two feet from something that was made by hand hundreds or thousands of years ago by someone is very inspiring to me. The way you can still see the brush strokes, the detail in the stone.  All very interesting.  We ended up spending all of our time there in that section of the museum and never made it over to the modern art section.  Oh well.  There's always next time.
The one exhibit I loved was the one featuring the works of Dürer.  The I spent the most time looking at were of Mary and her live outside of Jesus's life and passion.  I thought it was neat how we would incorporate his signature into the works. We also spent some time watching and learning about the restoration process of Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of Saint Andrew.  They are using some serious modern technology to uncover the different layers of paint without actually doing it.  They showed, using x-rays, how the artist changed different aspects of the image while he was creating it.  Very cool.
All-in-all, the Cleveland Museum of Art is a fantastic place to spend the day exploring our past.