Metropolitan Museum of Art

For a century and a half, the Metropolitan Museum has been building a world-class collection of art and artifacts from around the world, across time.  Seventeen curatorial departments study, exhibit, and care for the objects in the Museum's collection.

One of the world's largest art museums, includes American art and decorative arts, European, African, Asian, Ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek art, Byzantine and Islamic art, and modern art. The Museum's comprehensive collection of medieval and Byzantine art is displayed in both the Main Building and in the northern Manhattan satellite location, The Cloisters museum and gardens.

The Museum mounts dozens of special, temporary exhibitions.  It was the Met that invented the "blockbuster" exhibition.

For those wishing to experience the Met’s unparalleled collection or to study masterpieces of painting from throughout history, an important new guide to the masterworks of the museum -- published September, 2016 -- is sure to become a classic.

Whether you go or not, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings (2016) is the first publication to celebrate the greatest and most iconic paintings of one of the largest, most important, and most beloved museums in the world. This impressive volume’s broad sweep of material, all from a single museum, makes it at once a universal history of painting and the ideal introduction to the iconic masterworks of the Metropolitan Museum. 

Lavish color illustrations and details of 500 masterpieces, created over 5,000 years in cultures across the globe, are presented chronologically from the dawn of civilization to the present. These works represent a grand tour of painting from ancient Egypt and classical antiquity and prized Byzantine and medieval altarpieces, to paintings from Asia, India, Africa, and the Americas and the greatest European and North American masters. This unprecedented book includes an introduction and illuminating texts about each artwork written by Kathryn Calley Galitz, whose experience as both a curator and educator at the Met makes her uniquely qualified. European and American artists include Duccio, El Greco, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Bronzino, Caravaggio, Turner, Velázquez, Goya, Rubens, Rembrandt, Brueghel, Vermeer, David, Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Degas, Sargent, Homer, Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, and Warhol. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings (2016)