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

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.
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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.
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
literally unimaginable in that our brains aren’t adequate to comprehend the sort of microscopic megacities hidden within the tiniest cell.
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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.
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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.
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
the Met’s old master wing
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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.
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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.
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
Johannes Vermeer, precious things of which the world has perhaps only thirty-four.