An oasis called a Metropolitan Museum

Dear reader, our professor gave us the assignment to pay a visit to a MET museum (not to be confused with METS), to write an essay about our experiences, and to pick one art we found the most intriguing. How did I feel about this task? This goes along in comparison if kids were taken to a bakery, asked to taste all the cakes, and discuss it afterwards.

When one approaches the museum, very often there is at least a small line. Once inside of the magnificent establishment I realized how many tourists were there, in addition to locals. It gives it so much importance since so many people travel thousands of miles and choose this trademark to visit. Oh, the size, the extraordinary high ceilings and employees in important-looking navy blue suits gave me a sense of as if my own achievement and honor. I showed my member ship card, donated $2, and proceeded to wander the lower levels. 

Do you have any idea how hard is to restrain yourself from touching anything?! Painting after painting; sculptures, jewelry etc.: all organized by centuries, as well as a style and colors of the art. I usually rush through the sections with head shot paintings. I do skim through the small summaries of the facts for each art piece though. At the first sight I assumed the portrays were of ordinary people, middle class, maybe from 16th or 17th century. Well, was I wrong. It was only of nobles from 18th and 19th centuries. Older themed paintings were mostly bible-inspired. 

Furthermore, I’ll never forget one necklace. It was huge, probably to cover the whole neck, a golden one filled with sapphires, green, red, and white diamonds, and other expensive stones. It was estimated at about $8M. But in a museum it’s easily overlooked from a distance in a sea of art. Makes you wonder, how worth is a museum? Billions of dollars, I googled!

Each room had different wallpapers or solid-colored walls. It was so easy to notice each art without any distractions from the walls. Since the silence or soft talk manners are obligatory I didn’t notice people around me. But, wouldn’t be nice to spend a night at a museum alone, or with a few good friends? In addition, I never realized before, but even though some rooms are well lit and others quite dark, one never gets affected by, sometimes, sudden illumination changes.

Huge surprise were the rooms with the original furnitures preserved from those "old" centuries, where I was under impression I was in somebody’s home, or better said, castle. Most of these rooms were dimmed. Supposedly, not only that the riches had everything carpeted, but they even had wall tapestries, full of rich, strong, and vivid colors, that sometimes covered the whole wall. The themes were of christianity origin, which was highly encouraged in the previous centuries when people had to be careful not to be proclaimed pagans, and therefore executed. Of course, museum also put on display rooms representing how the poor used to live. Apparently, they only lived from the basics with naked floors and walls. It looked cute in a clean museum though. Maybe the museum experts should recreate the homes of the poor closer to its realistic state, because in the books and movies they are often described as troubled: dark, filthy, moldy. Eventually they could even play with different scents. Oh, I could spend hours staring at the classical furnitures with complicated shapes. Some had miniature pictures carved-in. For example, there was a chest with drawers with about twenty small square-shaped detailed pictures of people, organized a certain way to tell a biblical story.

The scent was definitely different in these spaces with ancient furnitures. Pleasant, no worries: I was able to smell a real wood, as opposed to all those scent-free chemicals they use for furnitures these days, as well as artificial materials. Maybe that’s what drew me to them, in addition to the fascination of discovery how people used to live. The nobles slept on heightened beds; sometimes they even needed a small step, cloth-covered “of course”. Keep in mind that everything was handmade, no fancy factories back then.

Even the sound can affect the experience. In the furniture section I believe they included on purpose polished creaking hard floors. That way we can almost hear those people of the past talking and going about their whereabouts while slowly pacing in the already castle-like-homes corridors. Most other areas had marble flooring, either white or colored, even with some patterns, and a very few were carpeted.

I didn’t really have a formal approach, I was more curious in style of the art, it’s history/biography - who made it, when, and why.

I finally stumbled on a painting of a peasant girl. The painting had soft, calming colors of pale green, brown, white, blue, and yellow. The girl was standing in modest robes: a brown dress, with wide, medium-length sleeves, a white shirt protruding in the chest area from a dark grey light jacket, and canopy-like strings holding it together in the waist area as an attempt of a small fashion mark. Behind her was a small white ground floor cottage, with one window on the side, and red roof peeking. Semi-naked trees and grass were giving away it was a beginning of fall on one cloudy day. Standing on a path of the bare ground she was reaching with her hand towards the sky with her lips sealed, and the wondering mild eyes looking at something we cannot see, as if trying to communicate with it. Or maybe she was simply longing. A few feet behind her I started seeing shapes like legs. Then I realized there was a ghost of a person wearing light green clothes fitting tightly around its body. It was hard to figure out if it was a young man or a woman. The silhouette was looking at the girl, in non-treating way. If that wasn’t enough mystery I also noticed there was an angel guardian with a halo, almost touching the silhouette. The light colors and an angel gave me a sense that the painting might had been done during the renaissance era. Especially the style, using a sophisticated brush and enabling painting very thin lines, as if it was a pencil. In a summary I read next to the painting, it turned out it was a painting of Joan of Arc by famous french artist Jules Bastian-Lepage. It was inspired by the Bible, where a peasant girl Joan was visited by saints / apostles, who gave her the courage and strength to fight the "bad guys" in the hundred years war between France and England.

Title: Joan of Arc (oil on canvas)

Artist: Jules Bastian - Lepage

Date: 1879