As a watchman I can use this picture in something like the way it was intended to be used, and for that I am grateful. An artist in the fourteenth century wouldn’t have dreamed that one day there would be art connoisseurs and textbooks dedicated to something called art history. In Bernardo Daddi’s mind the painting must have been a kind of machine

This was a sacred space, and it came with its own sacred version of time. Djet it was called, the time of the gods and the time of the dead, the time that governs what is complete, unchanging, perfect, and everlasting. Unlike either the circle or the arrow, djet stands apart from nature and her ever-fluctuating processes. It is the time of austerel

When the event began, Chabon was first at the mic, and King and I watched from the wings. As Chabon read his short story, the master of horror bopped his head and rocked in his chair, going “Yeah, man, yeah. Yeah, man, yeah, yeah. Ooooo …” like he was a hepcat listening to Coltrane.

What was beautiful in the painting was not like words, it was like paint—silent, direct, and concrete, resisting translation even into thought. As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest. And I didn’t know what to make of that. It is always hard to know what to make of that. As a guard, I will be watchi

A couple of galleries away, there is a series of pictures Stieglitz made of his partner and later his wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. They aren’t portraits, and they aren’t snapshots. Studies, I suppose you’d call them: efforts to see her better—her hands, her feet, her torso, her breasts, her face, her face again, her face again. She was strik

With experience I’m coming to know that some works of art reward long looking while others give back less, and you often can’t guess at the outset which will be which.

When I spotted her, she was framed by a work more brutal and beautiful and even more truthful than the one I had found. It was painted by a master called Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, a Florentine working in the fourteenth century. Against a featureless gold background, it depicted a young man who was very beautiful but bluntly dead, supported bodily b

When in June of 2008, Tom died, I applied for the most straightforward job I could think of in the most beautiful place I knew. This time, I arrive at the Met with no thought of moving forward. My heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I badly want to stand still awhile.

Each morning, her priest would have opened her temple’s doors so that the limestone statue would catch the morning light. At that moment, she (the eternal Hatshepsut) would transform into an akh, a radiant being, in communion with her father, the sun. (More precisely, Amun-Re was the power that powered the sun, the invisible creative force behind t