Adventures at the Met

I know you get it, I’ve been busy. As a recap, consider: in February add a second job, in March move and get married, in April go to Mexico, in May graduate college, in June go to New York City, then take a deep breath. We got back from New York City two weeks ago where we visited with some internet friends who showed us the sights and how to use the Metro and let us sleep on their couch.

We ate a lot of food in New York City (I ate four bagels in five days) and a lot of walking. We saw a lot. Fortunately for me, among those things were two museums: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History.

Having grown up in Kansas City, I went on my first field trip to the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in the second grade. I still remember the smell quite vividly. I also remember the way the Arabia Steamboat Museum smelled when we went in the fourth grade. Luckily for you, I won’t be writing about the way The Met and the AMNH smelled for an entire post.

I’ve been to Kansas City’s National World War I Museum many times and it was this museum that taught me to meditate. Museums have always been for me a spiritual sort of experience. Even with a group, I tend to walk silently, apart from everyone else, gazing and reading and soaking in. I always move too quickly, I’m too immersed. I need to see it all. I’m routinely overwhelmed by the heights of human achievement, these repositories of human passion, knowledge, and excellence.

Both of the museums I visited in New York were huge. I was handed a map and told to choose what I wanted to see. In each, we managed three general areas.

At the Met, I saw an Egyptian temple and many sarcophagi.

A temple with a lot of early twentieth century graffiti on it. “Charles Smith 1928”

On our way to the Manus x Machina collection, I wandered through a hall full of medieval, Byzantine religious art and artifacts. I cried a little in this hallway at the intricacies of the work that these people did to encapsulate their worldviews in something you can tangibly see. I felt their labor and their passion.

I believe this is called a gospel book and it has an ivory cover adornment.

This book has a stylus for pointing at things!

I stood in a recreation of a room from English house and felt that I was Jane Austen. I saw the special exhibition, Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World. Many of the pieces in this exhibition came from the Hellenistic city of Pergamon, in present day Turkey. Aesthetically, I love Hellenistic sculpture. I love the visceral realness of it as a piece of art that you can not only lean in towards, but walk around.

This Zeus and his enormous left arm.

These two are thought to be siblings, I think. They were found next to each other.

Lastly, we made our way to the Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljucs exhibition. In this exhibit, we saw various artifacts of the Seljuc peoples, a Central Asian culture, from 1038 to 1307. We didn’t get through the whole thing before the museum closed but of what I saw, I loved the scientific artifacts the most. One special favorite being an astrolabe from 1102-03, with a sort of manual text in the case next to it.

Astrolabe.

A book which describes its use.

Another favorite was this combination box from 1200-01. To open it, each dial has to be turned to one of the sixteen letters on the six-pointed disk, which also has be pointed to the correct letter on the scale below it.

My original plan was to also talk about the Museum of Natural History, where I also wept, but I’ll have to save that for next week. I didn’t make it to the Met Cloisters or even most of the location on 5th Avenue, so guess what New York? I’ll be back.