Continued from previous post .
Dining at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
In all the great museums of the world, the refreshment points sell every product at a very high price; in New York, where even the air to breathe is sold at its weight in gold, be prepared for even higher prices (which will not necessarily correspond to the same quality).
The one on the left is the menu of the café on the first floor, next to room 548 which, in spite of its high prices, does not serve exquisite food.
I should point out that on the second floor, at the entrance to the Asian art section, there is another cafe that serves sushi which, at least on the surface, looked good, without costing more than the sad sandwiches at the Petrie cafe.
Section of European art and sculpture of 1800-1900
The section is composed of about thirty rooms where the main role is played by the great names of Impressionism and contemporaries; from Monet to Manet, from Degas to Pissarro, from Van Gogh to Courbet, Renoir, Gauguin, Cézanne... with the addition of some Turners, very beautiful, and a couple of Klimts, beautiful but not sensational.
Given that in general impressionism is an artistic movement that I am not crazy about, I report below the photos of some works of this section, which I went through relatively quickly to dedicate myself calmly to the section of European painting from 1200 to 1800.
Section of European Painting from 1200 to 1800
Upon entering the first room of this section, which, at least in my expectations, was the highlight of the visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was immediately struck by a rather innovative display that placed works by El Greco alongside works by Picasso; the intent, which in my opinion was fully successful, at least in this room, in addition to placing stylistically similar works side by side, even if separated by centuries of history, is to highlight, through a true synoptic representation, the influences exerted by an artist on posterity. That El Greco was an innovator well ahead of his time is nothing new, but exhibiting him alongside Picasso encourages a reading of the works of the sixteenth-century painter with new eyes; in particular, I found a landscape (here on the left) surprising, which, displayed next to Picasso and looked at distractedly, I could almost have mistaken for a Cézanne.
This diachronic arrangement is not always a happy one; for example, in another room there were displayed a few meters away a gold background by Benozzo Gozzoli and a triptych by Francis Bacon, both beautiful, but completely irreconcilable with each other.
Continuing in no particular order among the works that I consider (very subjective evaluation) to be of greatest interest, I would say that an artist on whose name the MET can certainly compete with any other museum in the world is Johannes Vermeer; if I counted correctly, the MET has 5 works by the Dutch painter, 3 of which are of an excellent standard and one in particular, the portrait of a woman, is among my favorite works in the entire museum; I have always been intrigued by the seraphic expression of the person portrayed; it is the expression of someone who has been listening to you for a few minutes and is already fed up with what you are saying and is waiting for the right moment to improvise an unconvincing excuse to get out of the way, or even the expression of someone who is having a job interview and when asked "why would you like to work with us" would really like to answer "because I need money to eat" but is trying to find the strength to answer "I really believe in your company mission", and Vermeer was phenomenal in capturing that fleeting moment of malice.
Another magnificent work, both for its aesthetic rendering and for its subject, is the Olympic urination by Lorenzo Lotto, which depicts the little Cupid intent on projecting his renal excretion onto his mother Venus, who seems to appreciate this golden shower like a seasoned porn star; whether the feat of the little Eros represents an early and failed attempt at a Kegel exercise to train for the powerful embraces in which the God of love will have to perform in adulthood or more prosaically a metaphor of fertility created by the Venetian artist for some married couple, the work, which is part of the rich vein of erotic-mythological representations of Renaissance Italy , certainly lends itself to numerous interpretations, more or less amusing, but captures the eyes for the quality of its realization.
Another work worthy of attention is a mythological scene by that great outsider of the Italian Renaissance, Piero di Cosimo; the work could in some way remind some of the Perseus Freeing Andromeda in the Uffizi , whether for its format or its mythological content, and it stands out for its attempt at a foreshortened representation of a recumbent body (already seen for example in the Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello in the Uffizi) which often engaged Renaissance artists and which obviously found its maximum expression in Mantegna's Dead Christ.
Continuing with parallels and affinities, I would like to point out a profile of a woman by Antonio and Piero del Pollaiolo which almost calligraphically follows the one in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, a bust of Scipione Borghese by Francesco Fanelli which takes inspiration from the two identical works by Gian Lorenzo Bernini kept in the Borghese Gallery in Rome and the Portrait of Francesco Sassetti by Ghirlandaio, which inevitably evokes the analogous and more famous painting by the same author kept in the Louvre.
The MET also exhibits, in addition to the one already mentioned belonging to the Lehman collection, some Rembrandts, at least two of which are of excellent quality. In addition to the portrait of Aristotle with the Bust of Homer, which the exhibition gives great prominence to, I would include among the important Rembrandts of the MET at least the Bellona, where Rembrandt gives full display of all his ability to represent matter and light with virtuosity.
I add to my personal selection of noteworthy works a Bronzino worthy of the best works exhibited at the Uffizi , the Ecce Homo by Antonello da Messina (quite illegible behind too shiny glass), The Penitent Magdalene and The Fortune Teller by Georges De La Tour.
The works I have cited above are my very personal selection among the works I consider most significant; obviously the collection is immensely larger and it would have been impossible, as well as sterile, to document all the valuable works exhibited (for example, I do not even mention three important works by Titian). I reject below, as in a residual and anonymous mass grave, to conclude my summary of this section, the photos of some "minor" works by great names in the history of art such as Botticelli, Bosch, Carpaccio, Mantegna, Van Eyck, Luca Signorelli, Andrea del Sarto, Cosmè Tura, Carlo Crivelli which, from my personal point of view, almost all have a common characteristic: they are works unknown to me created by authors whose production I thought I knew almost all, in addition to some works, such as a Rubens, a Goya and a Velazquez, which I add just because.
Sections of Asian and Arab art
As I said, the MET offers much more than I was able to see in a long day of visiting; I have included a few photos of other sections below, to convey the sense of variety and vastness of the collection. At the end of the day I managed to dedicate a few dozen minutes to the Asian section which, despite having some interesting works, seemed overall a bit disappointing (especially the Chinese and Japanese sections, about which I had high expectations), while I dedicated very little space to the Arab world which instead gave me the impression of having something more to offer.
Conclusions
At the end of the day and after almost 10 km of walking, the visit to the MET leaves me with mixed feelings. It is not only the lack of identity of the Museum, which I have already spoken about in the previous post; as I have already written, museums such as the Uffizi in Florence, the Prado in Madrid or the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam are prestigious showcases of the best works produced by the culture and the country that hosts the museum itself; this cannot be said of the MET, which at most could be described as an exhibition of the hypertrophic commercial capacity of the most important museum of the richest city in the world, which makes the MET more of a Wunderkammer than a museum capable of competing culturally with other large museum institutions. However, this objection could also be raised against other large museums, starting with the Louvre, the British Museum, and the National Gallery, where the main works are often the result of acquisitions or spoliations that have little to do with the local culture. The problem, I was saying, is not only the lack of a cultural identity of the MET, whose collections, however rich, sometimes seem to have been assembled in a somewhat haphazard way; I believe that another limit of the MET lies in the history of an institution that is relatively young, if compared to the great European museums; I have not studied the history of the MET in depth, but it seems clear to me that the bulk of the collections was formed when the great European museums had already been established and the great works had already been appropriated; so it is natural that the best works of Botticelli are in the Uffizi, where they have been for centuries, that the main works of Goya or Velazquez are in the Prado, that the main works of Rembrandt are in the Rijksmuseum or that the few works of Leonardo, for example, even if distributed throughout Europe were no longer available to enrich the collection of the MET; whoever looks for a Botticelli at the MET, for example, will find one, even of good workmanship, but obviously we are light years away from the Primavera; This limitation applies to almost every section, from the works of Carpaccio, Bosch, Van Eyck, Mantegna, Caravaggio and Guido Reni, to Impressionism, from the Galleria delle Armi which, although beautiful, cannot compete with the Stibbert Museum in Florence, to the Greco-Roman section, which, although it shows an hypertrophic effort in purchasing a large number of works on the market, can never be on par with the Capitoline Museums, which at every step exhibit a Belvedere Torso or a Laocoon and so on. If, therefore, the MET cannot compete on the high notes, it makes up for it on the overflowing dimensions and the incomparable variety of works exhibited, however always and undoubtedly valuable; in other words, it can be said that the MET is a colossal collection of many collections which, evaluated individually, would be good but not sensational and which rise to excellence not only for their quality but above all for their quantity.
For the sake of completeness, it must be said that among the sections I decided to sacrifice there is also the one on American art, which probably would have led me to partially revise my critical judgment.
That said, just as one can visit the Horne Museum in Florence with great pleasure knowing that one will not find Michelangelo's Doni Tondo or Rembrandt's Night Watch there, one can also visit with immense pleasure the MET, which will stun you with an indecent abundance of beauty from every place and time, and without taking anything away from my presumption as an Italian and European aware of the fact that, no matter how much money they put into it and no matter how many multimillionaire bankers the United States may generate, as far as art is concerned, we will always be a little ahead.
Practical advice
I visited the MET on January 3, in the middle of the Christmas holidays; entering at opening time I only had to queue for a few minutes; even though I booked well in advance, I did not have the impression that the reservation was necessary; in any case, for reservations well in advance, I always use Tiqets , which allows me to cancel up to 24 hours before entry and receive a full refund.
Even though it was the height of the Christmas holidays, and therefore with a significant influx of visitors, I did not have the perception of excessive crowding; the museum is so large that, no matter how many visitors there are, they disperse.
As I said before, I think it is essential to visit the museum on Fridays or Saturdays, when it is open until 9 pm, otherwise the time to visit the museum is definitely insufficient.
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