I never posted about my actual Met experience, which was amazing as always. This time felt like the most fruitful of the three or four times I’ve been. Probably because I feel like not only have I matured in recent times, but this time I was on my own, not with friends or family or a tour group, just being able to drink everything in and actually appreciate it, really appreciate it. I had so much fun, more than I was honestly expecting. I thought I would be lonely since I didn’t know anyone and the Met is so crowded. We actually arrived at 10:30, a bit earlier than expected, and things were quite empty for a little while. I went through the El Greco special exhibit with barely anyone around, entire rooms to myself, and then when I went back through half an hour later to take another look at one of the paintings and buy a print, there were hordes. That exhibit was the first I saw, and it was breathtaking. If you think of the old masters as men who painted on a limited palette, with the same dull reds and blues and earthy tones, you must see El Greco’s work. Some of those paintings I swear look like they were done in Technicolor. I was completely floored—I had no idea that any of the old great painters had worked in such vibrant colors. His “Last Judgment” was amazing not only because of the beauty of the people and angels and the scariness of the damned souls, but because of the bright reds and greens and orange and blues. Then he had paintings that were more in the style of his time, equally wonderful in technique but less striking in hue. I understand how El Greco wasn’t well-liked by his contemporaries when he tried that sort of thing. My personal favorite, the one I bought the print for, is his “View of Toledo”. He lived in Toledo for sixteen years, painting religious art for the monks there. The caption said that the painting was not topographically accurate (he added a church and monastery not visible from the point where he was painting) but sought to capture the “emotion” of the landscape itself. And he did. When I walked into the room where this painting hung, the last in the exhibit, a huge smile hit my face. There was no one else there, just me and this gorgeous piece of art that truly conveyed how majestic and serene and old Toledo seems to the viewer. The dark clouds rolling in across the mountains and the sweeping brushstrokes that make it look like that grass on the hillsides is actually moving in the breeze is just downright sexy. I never thought I would say that about a painting, but it was true. I had to take it home with me. I just felt this huge connection to this long-dead man, who was as enchanted by the Roman bridge that leads into the city as I was, taking a picture of it four hundred years later. Says something about those Romans, doesn’t it?
Enough about El Greco. There was so much more to see! I had to visit the arms and armaments, of course, always a favorite of mine. I love how much smaller men were in those days. Some of the little rooms reassembled from foreign castles and palaces have such low doorways, such small chairs. I told my mom she’d have been right at home, and I’d have been a giantess. I visited the VanGoghs, and I’m beginning to favor his “Irises” over the cypress trees, I think. I saw my “Pygmalion and Galatea”, and a cast of the cupid and psyche that I saw in the louvre. One of the most fascinating parts of the day was wandering through the ancient art, greek, roman, Egyptian, Mesopotamian. Instead of being largely ignorant of the socio-political context of these artworks, or of the styles they used or the meanings they held, this was stuff we’d already studied in class. I saw so many objects that are pictured in our art history textbook, and let me tell you, pictures do absolutely no justice. I felt so much more involved in it than when I wandered through those wings before on previous trips. Take the Temple of Dendur, the Egyptian temple reassembled in its entirety in the basement of the Met. Now I know that that temple was built near Aswan, in honor of a youth who drowned in the Nile, and was itself almost drowned in Lake Nasser when the Aswan dam was built. Only a quick effort through UNICEF saved that, along with the funerary temple of Rames II, with the fabulous eighty-feet statues of him in front, which were actually taken apart and airlifted to high ground. Ok, I could have read the plaques in the Met about this, but I knew it going in, and that made a difference to me. I saw the lamassu of Nimrud, stone guardians that had the body of a lion, the head of a man and the wings of a bird. Impressive in the book, but small. In life, sixteen feet high and intimidating as all hell. I saw the hippopotamus with the faience glaze, a brilliant blue after four millennia, I saw the fragment of a bust of Queen Tiy, mother-in-law of Akenaten, a guy who briefly turned all Egypt on its head. Only the mouth remained, but this is the most sensuous, perfect mouth you have ever seen. It was the beginning of the aesthetic ideal of feminine beauty in Egyptian sculpture, and was continued in the bust of Nefertiti which sadly is in Cairo. We saw the famous New York kouros, which is a Greek celebration of the nude male form. What’s interesting is that you can tell that they were influenced by the Egyptians in the rigid stance, the clenched fist, the left foot forward. And most fun for me was seeing the lions from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, fearsome looking lions carved in relief on brick and glazed with such beautiful paint that has lasted since 600 BCE. So much of what Mr. Kelly taught us freshman year has stayed with me—Plato’s allegory of the cave, the date of the Battle of Hastings, Zoroaster as the first monotheist (finally got my art professor to admit I was right on that one; technically the big Z has that honor and not Abraham)—and one of those things was the lions of Babylon. We had to choose an ancient artwork and do an essay on it, and I did the lions. I thought I did a pretty good job, but when I got it back I think I only got a B. I believe he said I only skimmed the surface. Seeing them now, four years later, I understand why. Now not only do I know what I’m seeing, a realistic lion, made of glazed rock, 7th century Babylon, but I understand what I’m seeing. I know that it was one of a hundred similar lions that would have lined the Ceremonial Way from the Ishtar Gate to the palace, that lions are big intimidation factors and a symbol of political power, that this was the route foreign emissaries took to the king, surrounded by evidence of his wealth and might. Back then I pretty much wrote about what the lion looked like, not what it would have signified in the time period in which it was created. Which is why I didn’t get an A. My term paper for Art History, by the way is to choose an ancient artifact and write a six page paper on it. That was the purpose of our trip to the Met. I wonder which piece of art I’ll be choosing….hm.