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

the Met’s old master wing

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.

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.

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.

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

Goya, the nearest old master to our own time,

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:

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

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.