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

the Met’s old master wing

aside. In a typical gallery, ten or twenty gold-framed windows are blowing holes through the four walls.

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.

Such a maneuver was a means of moving past my perception of soundless beauty and finding a language that might allow me to move and to shake out in the real world.

Goya, the nearest old master to our own time,

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.

The oldest is a Madonna and Child from the 1230s, the youngest a portrait by Francisco de Goya from 1820. After about that date, the paintings leap to the far south end of the museum, where the modern world steadily gains ground:

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.

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.