Visiting the Met

A successful visit to the Met. Ghiberti’s doors for the Florence baptistery, or rather, some of the panels, were on display. It was the last day for the exhibit and that was the big reason for the visit.

They’re excellent, but I was a bit frustrated with the lack of technical detail available to those of us not willing to buy the catalogue. How exactly do lasers clean the doors? The New Criterion essay summed up the exhibit well.

I also checked out the reinstalled Wrightsman Galleries, pre-revolution french period rooms. They’re reviewed here.

I went to middle school and high school in Deerfield, Mass., which is a museum town as well as a town with several private schools… There are around 2-dozen museum houses there (sorta like Williamsburg, but w/o the living history interpretation). So I’ve long been interested in this sort of thing. And (as it should be considering that it’s the Met, it was well done.

But I was most excited by the fact that Hubert Robert’s landscapes for the Chateau de Bagatelle of the Comte d’Artois are back on display in these galleries.

I saw these when they were briefly on display a while back. Check out this article if you don’t know the story of the Chateau.

You could design, build and decorate a Chateau (a Church) in 65 days right, Matthew?

Images:
“Ghiberti’s doors”
Picture by “unertlkm”
Used under a Creative Commons License

The Bathing Pool
Hubert Robert (French, 1733–1808)
Oil on canvas; 68 3/4 x 48 3/4 in. (174.6 x 123.8 cm)
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.29)
The Metropolitan Museum