The main attractions of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are the halls of Egyptian art, paintings and sculptures by American masters, weapons and armor, modern art, Greek and Roman art, paintings by European artists, and the magnificent rooftop terrace where you can enjoy the bar. The view from there is spectacular all summer long.
This museum can rightly be ranked alongside the Hermitage, the Louvre, and the Prado. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was opened in 1870 by New York art lovers, and today it is the largest collection of art in the Western hemisphere. The current museum building is styled as an Italian Renaissance palace. Over time, the Metropolitan expanded into as many as four blocks. In the early 80’s all buildings of the museum united under a huge glass gallery-gallery, at the same time having included in this winter garden Empire portico of the demolished Federal Bank Architect Thompson (1823). entirely transferred from Egypt, the ancient temple of the Hellenistic period and stained glass workshop Tiffany early XX century.
The museum has two million objects, and its collection spans all periods of human history, from the Paleolithic to Pop Art, all geographic regions, from Europe to the Far East and Patagonia, and all types of art, from academic canvases to Japanese water sculptures to feather masks from Oceania. One of the most impressive halls is the Assyrian Hall, where the huge winged bulls that guarded the entrance to the throne room of King Ashurnasirpal II 3,000 years ago stand.
From the same palace are taken the bas-reliefs with bearded warriors and cuneiform decorating the walls. In the antique collection there are magnificent black-figure and red-figure vases, gravestones and magnificent Attic sculptures of the archaic period. Only Athens has a more impressive collection.
The main star of the pictorial collection is Vermeer. In the Metropolitan hangs five of his canvases – more than in the British Museum. Plus there are 21 Cezanne’s, 37 Monet’s and an incredible array of other notable paintings. Plus Chinese calligraphy, painted Japanese screens and Hokusai color prints (the infamous “36 Views of Mount Fuji”). A whole row of rooms reproduce styles and eras: a rococo bedroom, a seventeenth-century Parisian salon, an 18th-century baroque Venetian palazzo, the living room of an English country house with a 19th-century esquire’s milkman and clavichords, and so on, right up to a Quaker American settler’s room in the second half of the 19th century with a washstand and a fireplace stovepipe reaching down the window. Everywhere, of course, is original furniture, upholstery, crockery, and so on. To look through all this, even from behind a string, is sometimes much more interesting than to march through a battalion of pictures. April 18, 1870 is the official birthday of the museum. And the first gift was the collection of the former American Consul in Cyprus, General Chesnol, which consisted of about 9 thousand works of decorative-applied art and monuments of antiquity. Banker Bend Altman donated such masterpieces of painting as Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait, paintings by Dürer, Velázquez, Botticelli and Titian. “Sleeping Girl” by Dutch Vermeer of Delft (there are only 35 paintings of this amazing artist in the world).
In 1929, the widow of the “sugar magnate” Louise Havemeyer bequeathed her collection to the museum. Among the gifts were masterpieces such as El Greco’s Portrait of the Cardinal. F. Goya’s “Mahy on a Balcony”, drawings and prints by Rembrandt, canvases by E. Manet, C. Monet, Degas and Cézanne. It’s worth stopping here, otherwise the guide would swell to a gigantic catalog of the treasures collected in this place.
The peculiarity of this museum is the presentation of the material, the desire as if to transport visitors to a distant era, to a foreign country by time machine. The Villa Blunca is a striking example. Italian nobleman Pedro Facardo y Chacon built his castle for 10 years (from 1506 to 1515). The decoration of the castle was a patio, made by the best examples of exquisite Italian architecture of the time. It took more than 2,000 marble blocks. Balconies, arches and columns were made of them. All this is collected in the museum in a separate room, which accurately reproduces this courtyard created by Italian masters.
Museum Exhibit
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has 17 departments, each devoted to the art of a particular part of the world or time period in history.
One of the museum’s most interesting exhibits (and one of the first to go) is Greek and Roman Art. The collection of rooms on this theme has more than 17,000 pieces, dating from the Neolithic Age to the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire in 312 A.D. These are numerous antique vases, vessels, household items, statues, jewelry and military armor, all housed in rooms with appropriate light colors, similar to the marble palaces of antiquity. In addition, some rooms house exhibits from the pre-Greek and pre-Roman eras, including examples of Etruscan art in Italy.
Equally fascinating is the exhibition devoted to the art of ancient Egypt. Mummies, sarcophagi, fragments of tombs, as well as objects of worship and everyday life, jewelry and much more await visitors in this section. There are about 26,000 exhibits in all. But the main treasure of the exhibition is the entire ancient Egyptian temple of Dendur, which was saved from demolition during the construction of the Nile River power plant and moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibit on Asian art also abounds in antiquities. Many of its objects are about 4,000 years old. It is also one of the most numerous. It features paintings, examples of sculpture of various sizes, examples of decorative castings, wooden engravings, writing, ceramics, and other works of art from all regions of Asia. The halls of this section are decorated in the appropriate style: when visitors enter them, they find themselves on the other side of the ocean, among the tea houses and pagodas.
The ancient world is also represented in the museum by the exposition devoted to the art of the Middle East. It includes both the first civilizations and the art of Islam. This collection is considered the most complete in the world. Total number of exhibits is more than 7000 items. Among them are clay tablets of the first Sumerian writing, seals, weapons, jewelry, everyday objects and cults. The collection began with a small number of exhibits, but in recent years, thanks to benefactors and sponsors, it has grown considerably, both quantitatively and thematically.
One of the Metropolitan Museum’s largest collections, devoted to the art of Africa, the Americas and Oceania, deserves special attention. The Sub-Saharan Africa, Pacific Islands, North, Central, and South America art collection contains more than 11,000 works of art of various materials and types, representing various cultural traditions from 3000 B.C. to the present. Major exhibitions include decorative and ceremonial objects from Nigeria, sculptures from West and Central Africa, images of gods and spirits from New Guinea, the islands of Melanesia and Polynesia, and Southeast Asia. In addition, the museum houses everyday life and cult objects made of precious metals, ceramics and stone from the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico, Central and South America.
One of the Metropolitan Museum’s large areas is occupied by several exhibits devoted to the Middle Ages.
The Medieval and Byzantine art exhibition is one of the largest in the world. It covers the art of the Mediterranean and Europe from the fall of Rome in the fourth century to the beginning of the Renaissance in the early 16th century. European works of art from the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age are also included.
Separate rooms are devoted to a rich collection of musical instruments from all over the world, of which there are about 4,000 pieces. Ancient ethnic as well as medieval European instruments can be seen here. Their exhibition first opened in 1942 and in only 70 years has grown to the volume of a separate museum.
Complementing and continuing the theme of the Middle Ages is a separate section on weapons and armor. These objects have been a vital part of virtually all cultures for millennia, playing a key role not only in conquest and defense, but also in courtly amusements and ceremonial events. Throughout time, the finest armor and weapons represented the highest artistic and technical capabilities of the society and period in which they were made. The halls with armor and weapons are divided by era and country. Most of the exposition is devoted to European armor and weapons.