Hundreds of paintings in 45 galleries: a guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new European wing

Five years after the Metropolitan Museum of Art began a major renovation of its European art galleries, the super-prestigious gallery has reopened. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's designers expanded the spaces, changed sightlines, and painted the walls purple and blue. For the first time since 2018, curators have reassembled the entire collection of paintings, shuffled them across 45 new galleries and illuminated them with beautiful, subdued lighting. Edition The New York Times has prepared a guide to the new European wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The work was carried out in two stages, so visitors were able to experience even, shadow-free lighting when the museum presented a reduced exhibition in part of these galleries in 2020.

For more than a century, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, these paintings were arranged according to national schools: on the one hand - Italian, on the other - Dutch. Now you will get acquainted with the art of the entire continent in a single chronological sequence, starting with the early Renaissance in central Italy and ending approximately 500 years later in France and Spain.

You'll see works by Francis Bacon, Johann Beckmann and Kerry James Marshall. Duccio di Buoninsegna's Madonna and Child, painted in Tuscany around 1300, now stands next to Ingres's 1852 painting of the same subject. You will see new acquisitions.

With nearly 700 paintings on display, it can be difficult to know where to start.

On the subject: The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open a free educational studio for children: they will teach through entertainment

The New York Times suggests focusing on six faces: male and female, human and divine, European and other. The face is the central focus of painting and its main concern. For centuries, an artist who left his name on a canvas could paint only his face and hands, and assistants were hired to do the rest of the work. Put these six together, look into their twelve eyes, and you can roughly imagine the European cultural heritage.

Gallery 601: In search of the true image

Let's start in gallery 601 with a very familiar face on a small rectangle of wood, painted in Italy between 1350 and 1370. The Son of God looks straight at us with large, sad eyes framed by a large forehead and light brown hair. Small lips. Long nose. A few mustache lines. A sharp triangle at the junction of two muscles on the chin.

The face of Christ occupies only the lower half of the picture, and around his head a halo is applied on the golden ground using punching tools. Above him, two angels, so similar and symmetrical that they could be cut out and pasted on, hold between them a large cloth similar to the veil that Veronica pressed to the face of Jesus on the Via Dolorosa.

We live in a time when imagery is becoming a central component of worship. And the artist, who was previously content with illustrations for books or frescoes on the walls, now works on free-standing pieces.

Therefore, whoever painted this panel (possibly Niccolo di Tommaso; in any case, he was a follower of Orcagna, the leading painter of XNUMXth-century Florence) sought to create something more than just an image. This was a tangible example of the Word made flesh. The curators note that there are no hinge marks on the back of this panel, suggesting that it may have been passed around and kissed during the liturgy.

Gallery 605: The Invention of Personality

And in Italy, in the years after 1350, unrest began. Architects and artists begin to study their predecessors from Greece and Rome, scientists and theologians begin to apply a new approach to philosophical research, less scholastic and more rational. All this is called in one word “Renaissance”, and here, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is impossible not to notice how everything has changed. New naturalism. New individualism. From this moment on, the man, and in rare cases the woman, become sufficient on their own.

1446 In bustling Bruges, then Europe's largest port, a Carfucian monk sits before Petrus Christus, a licensed member of the local painters' guild. The light casts soft shadows from the monk's bushy beard onto his smoky robe. Look at his lips, at the finely drawn mound of his right cheek. On the forehead: fine wrinkles, prominent vein. He doesn't pray. He just looks at us in profile, three-quarter view, with watery gray-green eyes.

What you saw, moving from the flatness of the Florentine Christ to the layered tones of the friar, is one of the largest revolutions in new media in the history of Western art. This new medium was oil paint: a Flemish technological breakthrough.

Unlike the fast-drying egg pigment used for Christ's head, slow-drying oil paint allowed artists like Christus to capture watery irises, bristly facial hair, reflective marble, sparkling jewels. Applied thick or thin and mixed wet-on-wet, oil paint became an almost chemical expression of Renaissance humanism. At the bottom of the picture, on a fictitious frame, Christus even drew a fly: a demonstrative reminder that the person depicted in the picture is not some eternal symbol, but a person with one fleeting life.

Gallery 612: Love of Money

If something special is important for Europe in the context of a global art museum, then this is it: an unprecedented engagement, since 1400, with the particularities of the individual. You've entered a transalpine showcase of XNUMXth-century portraits of nobles, scientists and the nouveau riche. Germans such as Hans Holbein and Lucas Cranach the Elder mingle with Tintoretto, Veronese and other Italians. The sitters pose in exquisite fabrics.

The newest acquisition, donated last year, is a portrait of Italian banker and philanthropist Bindo Altoviti. Mannerist Francesco Salviati painted it in 1545 not on canvas or wood, but on an inch-thick block of marble. Take a moment to look at the furrowed brows and slightly numb hands - evidence of the political headache associated with extending loans to popes and princes.

Crazy luxury: a coat lined with fur as thick as a beard, and velvet everywhere you look. The history of art, then and now, is the history of banking, and usury, remember, was still a mortal sin. Two centuries after the “true image” of Christ, these paintings by Renaissance financiers accomplish a different kind of transubstantiation: the transformation of vain luxury into high culture.

Gallery 637: Market Days

And yet European painting has never abandoned non-specific faces, faces as types: saints and symbols, examples of social classes. We are transported to XNUMXth-century Holland, a new Protestant republic where artists painted to order in a completely new commercial art market.

Gallery 637 contains The Smoker, painted by Frans Hals around 1625 on an octagonal piece of wood. A young man with a shock of brown hair is carousing in a tavern. He grins disgustingly. A woman in a lace collar wrapped her arms around his neck.

However, there is nothing careless about this rudeness. Take a look at the mixture of light and dark strokes that make up the smoker's cut doublet. What's in the tube? Of course, tobacco.

Gallery 642: Venetian souvenirs

Who can be considered a full-fledged personality, and who remains only a type? The issue took on new urgency in the XNUMXth century, when philosophers Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and Condorcet debated women's rights and royal art academies sometimes reluctantly made room for women artists.

In 1730 or 1731 an Irish peer sailed to Venice to take part in the carnival. During his vacation, his portrait was painted by the world-famous star Rosalba Carriera, a Venetian artist and writer with her own studio. She worked on paper, to make it more convenient for collectors to take the portrait home, using pastels, which were fashionable at that time. Look at his powdery cheek, his shadowed double chin: here it’s like ice milk, there it’s like wood ash. This modulation, possible only by applying more and less pressure with the pastel stick, made Carriera one of the best Rococo painters.

Gallery 628: The Empire Strikes Back

So, the 628th century came: enlightenment, development, extraction, enslavement. With the advent of the modern era, the Met's galleries are truly beginning to globalize. In the paintings you can now see Asian fauna and American flora, Europeans pose in Chinese and Indian fabrics. Gallery 1792, dedicated to Georgian Britain, has the usual aristocrats, pale, rich and titled, as well as a woman from Bengal called Joanna de Silva, who painted a self-portrait in XNUMX.

In Calcutta, she worked as a nanny for the family of a British officer, and when he and his wife died, de Silva and her orphaned child went to Britain. There, probably in memory of the move, the British portraitist William Wood depicted her looking into the distance. Jewels in her hair, in her right ear, even more on her neck and ring finger. She is dressed in Indian fabrics, which the British then considered the height of foreign fashion.

A painting depicting a maid as an independent person is quite rare. The unusual thing about Joanna de Silva, who joined the Met in 2020, is her piercing gaze up and to the right. In these eyes, the artist reaffirmed the one XNUMXth-century European heritage that we can never abandon: the principle that all men are created equal. De Silva has the same composure as the monk Petrus Christus or the smoker Hals centuries earlier, but her eyes seek further, her eyes look to the east.