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:

Goya, the nearest old master to our own time,

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

the Met’s old master wing