Look Harder at Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art seems to be busy most of the time, especially with their flexible entry fees. However, as the New York Times writes, museums are looking for new ways to bring people to the art. Later in section F of Thursday (3/19) paper, they note that the gems of the museums are hidden!
Instead of offering valet parking for bicyclists, as they are at the Hammer Museum at UCLA and free yoga classes at the MoMA (they are thinking of having another class in the sculpture garden at the museum) they might attract even more tourism and rouse interest in art by simply revealing the pieces of art they are hiding.
In general Museums own much more than they can display. The Times cites that institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston owns 450,000 pieces but only displays about 18,000 of them.
If you hang the map of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on your wall, you’ll know your way around and how to find the famous impressionistic paintings. However, the museums should be showing off, “The Good Stuff in the Back Room” if they want more visitors.
For instance, above a small doorway in MET “Gubbio Studiolo” is engraved in letters no larger than a few inches. Inside, however:
Using the linear perspective techniques of Brunelleschi during the Renaissance, (Studiolo was commissioned in 1476) Federico da Montefeltro left the walls completely flat but carved so carefully that the room gives the appearance of having three dimensions. The French call it a “trompe l’oeil.”
The room, which even has a bird etched into its own cage in right corner, is not only hard to find, but is not always open to the public. The MET and other Museums needs to start showing off its fancy works and ditch the yoga parties.
So intricately inlaid, it seems to have directly influenced the work of German baroque sculpture Andreas Schluter and the Danish Gottfried Wolfram in the creation of The Amber Room. Sometimes referred to as the Eight Wonder of the World, the room is completely carved from panels of amber and jewels. Together the panels are worth $142 million.
The problem is that most of the Amber Room’s Panel’s were lost when Nazi Germany stole them from the Soviet Union during World War II.
Point is: Go to the Stuidolo. Go to the Museums. Look Hard. You will not be disappointed.
The Amber Room before the Nazi’s stole it:
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