All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

In fact, a cloister was the open-air center of a monastery, a place set apart from the wider world but not from the sun, moon, and stars.

Monet, I realize, has painted that aspect of the world that can’t be domesticated by vision—what Emerson called the “flash and sparkle” of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves.

If you want to know if something is funny, see if it makes you laugh. If you want to know if a painting is beautiful, see if it evokes an equivalent response, one as definite as laughter though usually quieter and shyer to emerge.

The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that’s there. We shouldn’t think “This is good,” or “This is bad,” or “This is a Baroque picture which means X, Y, and Z.” Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn’t think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.

They say that the roots of a tree are every bit as extensive as the branches. The Met is like this, too, with two floors below the galleries exactly as endless as the areas the public knows.

literally unimaginable in that our brains aren’t adequate to comprehend the sort of microscopic megacities hidden within the tiniest cell.

Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious. This is real, is all it says. Take the time to stop and imagine more fully the things you already know.

Even the name Venice relates to the Latin venetus meaning sea blue. The greatest Venetian of the sixteenth century was Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian, and he enveloped his scenes in rose-tinted atmosphere, as though he mixed his pigments in puddle water and red wine.

Johannes Vermeer, precious things of which the world has perhaps only thirty-four.