Recap: Sacred Works in Secular Places Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to the New York Times, Medieval art is rarely seen outside museums and churches. Even in museums its installation tends to be hushed, sepulchral. So to come upon it in a commercial setting, even a genteel Upper East Side town house, is something of a shock.

The Blumka Gallery’s biennial exhibition, “Collecting Treasures of the Past,” is an exception. This year Tony Blumka has coordinated with the London dealer Sam Fogg, who has organized a show of medieval works a few blocks away at the Alexander Gallery. Together the two exhibitions present a multichambered curiosity cabinet of sacred objects in a secular context.

“Art of the Middle Ages,” the show at Alexander consisting entirely of medieval art and drawn mostly from a single private collection, is the grander of the two. A corridor filled with stained glass opens onto a high-ceilinged main gallery that would not be out of place in the Cloisters. Here, however, you can run your hands over the sculptures and turn the pages of the illuminated manuscripts, without gloves

Most of the tapestries here are of the highest possible quality. More blatantly than most luxury arts, tapestries were designed to flatter their patrons, to exalt their self-professed virtues: their valor, their munificence, their chic. The weaver François Spierling, a Mennonite from Antwerp, settled in Delft, a Protestant town, and produced superlative work there. The tapestry called “Garden With Diana Fountain” is an example of a fashionable, precision-friendly Mannerist style for depicting small figures embedded in all-over patterning.

The result is not an image of the natural world in a tapestry but a depiction of nature as a tapestry: a splendid, impenetrable, depthless screen of shivering pixels.

Rubens revolutionized tapestry, transforming it into an expressive painterly medium. After the job was finished, Rubens didn’t get another tapestry commission for several years.

A domestic scene in tapestry designed by Rubens’s follower Jacob Jordaens overflows with fruit, dead game and blowsy ornament. And a 1664 tapestry designed by Charles Le Brun, depicting the sea god Neptune assailed by a storm, vomits an entire aquarium of beached and gasping sea creatures in our faces.