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| The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Pinterest) |
A city bustling with life, New York's top attractions have been featured regularly in blockbuster films that most visitors will surely recognize and even feel as though they know the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, and Times Square before even visiting. Perhaps what visitors are less aware of is the city's wealth of amazing museums, which are definitely worth a visit.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is an art museum at the eastern end of Central Park, along with the "Museum Mile" in New York City, United States. Its permanent collection is more than two million works of art, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, often called "the Met", is one of the largest art galleries in the world; there is also a second, smaller location, in "The Cloisters", Upper Manhattan, which features Medieval art.
The permanent collection includes works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures by nearly all of Europe's most famous painters, and a large collection of American and modern art. The Met also has artwork from Africa, Asia, Oceania, Byzantium, and Islam. The museum is also home to a collection of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and ancient weapons and armor from around the world. Several aristocratic interiors, from first century Romanesque to modern American designs are in the Met gallery.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of Americans. Its founders included entrepreneurs and financiers, as well as artists and thinkers, who wanted to open a museum to bring art and art education to America. The museum opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue. In 2007, the museum occupied an area of more than 190,000 square meters.
Collection
Ancient Near Eastern Art
Beginning in the late 19th century, the Met began to collect collections of ancient art and artifacts from the Near East. From several cuneiform tablets and seals, the museum's collection grew to more than 7,000 pieces. The collection spans from the Neolithic period, to the fall of the Sassanid empire, and to the end of civilization. The collection of ancient Near Eastern art includes works by Sumerian, Hittite, Sassanid, Assyrian, Babylonian and Elamite cultures, including a large collection of Bronze Age objects. The most proud collection is the monumental stone collection of lammasu, or protective figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II.
Weapons and Armor
The Department of Arms and Armor is one of the museum's most popular collections. Rows of horsemen wearing armor that is placed on the first floor is a museum image that is most often remembered by the public. The display is set in 1975 with the help of Russian immigrant and weapons and armor researcher Leonid Tarassuk (1925-1990).
The department focuses on "extraordinary craftsmanship and decor," and this means that the department's finest collections are late Medieval European collections, and Japanese Collections from the 5th to 19th centuries AD. The department's collections have a wider regional scope than any other department and number about 14,000 pieces, including weapons and armor from the early dynasties of Egypt, ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the ancient Near East, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, particularly the collections American weapons such as Colt pistols from the 19th and 20th centuries. Many of these items were worn by princes and kings, including the armor of Henry VIII of England, Henry II of France, and Ferdinand I of Germany.
Islamic Art
The collection of Islamic art owned by this museum is not only related to religious art, although most of the collections were created for religious activities or as decoration elements in mosques. The department's 12,000 collections, including secular collections such as ceramics and textiles, originate from Islamic cultures from Spain to North Africa and Central Asia. The department's most famous collections are miniature paintings from Iran and the Mughal empire in India.
Both religious and secular calligraphy are exhibited here, from the official decrees of Suleiman I to several Qur'anic manuscripts that date back to the period and have different calligraphic styles. The Islamic Art Gallery has undergone several renovations since 2001 and reopened on November 1, 2011 as a new gallery for Arab, Turkish, Iranian, Central Asian and late South Asian Art. The gallery has several interior collections, including a reconstruction of the 18th-century Nur Al-Din Room in Damascus.
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