Please Touch

A museum on top of the hill at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale may be one of the area’s best-kept secrets. It’s a delightful museum, complete with suits of armor, ancient coins, paintings from Europe and Asia, and sculptures from many cultures.

People who visit Forest Lawn to see “The Resurrection,” a popular display in a nearby building, usually discover the Forest Lawn Museum by chance, Curator Margaret Burton said.

“Children love ‘Henry’ because he’s so ugly,” Burton said about a sculpture named for a certain Harry Wendt, who obtained it for the museum in a deal with denizens of Easter Island. Now it’s illegal to remove any of those mysterious stone heads from the island 2,000 miles off the coast of Peru.

Unlike other museums, Forest Lawn encourages visitors to touch the statuary. When touring teenagers laid hands on “Henry” during a recent visit, they were reprimanded by their tour organizer. But Burton gleefully countered, “You can touch!”

“We are ADA- (Americans With Disabilities Act) compliant here,” Burton explained later. “How can blind people appreciate your museum if they can’t touch things?”

The Getty Center, by the way, will soon borrow several of the Forest Lawn Museum’s 13th- to 16th-century stained glass windows to include in a touring show of the art form.

Originally owned by William Randolph Hearst, the pieces include 10-foot-high glass panels made in Germany between 1502 and 1506 from drawings by Albrecht Duerer.

Bronze works on display range from those by Frederic Remington, Charles Russell and Gutzon Borglum, the man who created Mount Rushmore, to one molded from the famous “Doors of Paradise” by Lorenzo Ghiberti, which adorns the Baptistry of St. John in Florence, Italy.

Paintings include “Song of the Angels” by William Bougereau, whose 19th-century depictions of cherubs are widely reproduced on greeting cards. The angels in the museum’s painting are a little unusual. Visitors gaze at them awhile, Burton said, before realizing all three are the same attractive person viewed from different angles. Even the Virgin Mary has the face--it’s Bougereau’s fiancee.

Burton likes to point out a 1599 New Testament with the Scriptures in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Latin, German, Czech, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Danish and Polish. This polyglot edition preceded the King James version by a decade, she said.

The American historical items include letters by Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Henry Longfellow and an actual Nobel Prize medal donated to the collection by its winner, American soldier-statesman Charles Dawes.

BE THERE

Forest Lawn Museum, 1712 Glendale Ave., Glendale. Open seven days a week, including holidays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Free. (800) 204-3131.