Metropolitan Museum of Art
NEW YORK CITY
Founded in 1870 with 174 Dutch and Flemish paintings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art sits on the eastern edge of Central Park in New York City, a massive Gothic-Revival structure housing more than 2 million works of art. Cared for and maintained by 19 curatorial departments, hundreds of museum staff, and one very busy director, “the Met” has been greatly expanded since the late 1800s; currently its 2 million square feet of gallery space offers a bit of everything imaginable, spanning 5,000 years of creativity from even the most far-flung corners of the world. Its encyclopedic collection contains masterworks from European Post-Impressionism and ancient Greco-Roman artifacts, as well as the Egyptian Temple of Dendur (from 15 BCE) and stone lamassu, towering mythic beasts that guarded the gates to the ancient Assyrian city of Kalhu.
The medieval portion of the Met’s collection is housed in the Cloisters, a building and garden complex built from and modeled after medieval sanctuaries and other monastic sites in southern France. Located in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan, the Cloisters’ collection encompasses 5,000 works of art, ranging from 9th-century tapestries to 15th-century stained glass windows and other works of art. Between the two locations, you could spend a lifetime enjoying the variety and history of the works on display and still not see everything in the Met’s collection! —SBR
Façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.