The Walters Art Museum and the Knight's Armor That Waits

The Walters Art Museum and the Knight's Armor That Waits

The Walters Art Museum at 600 North Charles Street is free, always — a gift to the city from the Walters family, who believed that art was too important to have a price of admission and endowed the museum accordingly. The collection spans 5,500 years, from Egyptian mummies to Fabergé eggs, and the building — a palazzo-style gallery in the Mount Vernon neighborhood — has the proportions and the confidence of a museum that knows it belongs in the conversation with the Met and the National Gallery and simply hasn't bothered to argue the point.

The medieval armor gallery is the room that stops you. Full suits of plate armor stand in rows like soldiers frozen mid-parade, their visors down, their gauntlets at their sides, and the craftsmanship — the articulated joints, the etched decoration, the fact that someone made a metal glove that could grip a sword and also pick up a coin — makes you reconsider what "technology" meant six centuries ago. Children love this room. Adults are startled by it. The difference is only that adults know the armor was used.

The illuminated manuscripts room holds one of the finest collections in the Americas — hand-painted books from medieval monasteries, their pages vivid with gold leaf and mineral pigments that have been glowing since the 12th century. The detail is microscopic: a face the size of a thumbnail, rendered with an expression that is still legible 800 years later. Standing before these pages with a magnifying glass that the museum provides is the closest you will come to communicating with a medieval monk, and the conversation is surprisingly warm.

What visitors miss: The Chamber of Wonders on the fourth floor — a recreation of the Renaissance-era Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities) with shells, minerals, scientific instruments, and oddities arranged in the spirit of 16th-century collectors who believed that the world could be understood by gathering enough interesting things in one room. It's the most delightful room in the building, and it's the one fewest people reach because the elevator doesn't announce it.