The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC: Part 6, “A Collection of Collections”

Built on the shoulders of capitalism, the Metropolitan Museum of Art owes many of its treasures to the enormous wealth and generosity of America's captains of business and industry. And many of them, in fact, formed their collections with the Metropolitan in mind. Financial giant, Robert Lehman, spent a lifetime assembling what would become one of the greatest private collections of the 20th century. Robert Lehman and his father, Philip, were collectors on a very grand scale. And it's a collection which stands on its own, in its own wing at the Met. The Lehman Collection is uniquely displayed in rooms that evoke the setting of a private home. You can put yourself in any of the armchairs in Lehman Wing, stay there as long as you please, and imagine that you, too, have an El Greco over the fireplace. There are very few categories of art that are left out of the Lehman Collection. Lehman's personal favorite was this portrait by the 19th century French artist, Ingres. The Ingres portrait of the Princess de Broglie is widely considered one of the most beautiful paintings in the world. All the textures and details portrayed with such brilliant accuracy as to leave almost nothing to the imagination but in the most positive possible sense. Lehman's real passion was art by the Italian painters of the early Renaissance, preeminent among them Botticelli. Early Italian artists were restrained not only by their subject matter, religion, but also by their medium. They painted mostly on wood with tempera, a mixture of pigment, water, and egg yolk. But superior skills and fertile imaginations triumphed over the limitations of the paint and surface. Here, Giovanni de Paolo depicts two scenes from the 15th century view of the universe, the creation and the expulsion. In the center of the painting is a small disk which represents Earth. Around Earth are the spheres of the four elements and the known planets, and God the Father on a cloud of angels floats in from the left and sets all the spheres in motion which will initiate the cycle of creation. Painted barely five years later, but a world away, the detailed sophistication of this painting by Flemish artist Petrus Christus was due in part to the recent invention of oil paint which would revolutionize the Western art world. Titled Saint Elegius, the patron saint of goldsmiths, it shows a young couple come to seek a wedding ring. A mirror reflects two onlookers outside. Behind the goldsmith are rings, coral, crystal cups, gold work, the sort of thing that you would find in Tiffany's 500 years ago. Of the Dutch and Flemish, I would say that there is much more emphasis upon rendering the surfaces, the material has about it a kind of heightened realism. Perhaps the most inspired early practitioner of painting with oils was Jan van Eyck. His Crucifixion and Last Judgment hang in the Met's comprehensive European painting department. In his hands, painting in oil is raised to perfection, and with oil glazes he's able to describe with his brush unbelievable details. The rural life is the subject of Peter Bruegel's masterpiece The Harvesters. The artist is no longer using a religious subject to show a landscape. These are working people, peasants, who have been taking a break for their noonday meal, and some of them have fallen asleep. And you can see them stretched out on the hay, and extraordinary details throughout the entire picture. The seventeenth century was the golden age of Dutch and Flemish painting, the period of the old masters. The Met has rooms filled with Rembrandt, Rubens, and the rarest of all, Vermeer. If you come to the Met, you don't see one Vermeer, you see five. It's extraordinary. You see one of the earliest known works, and you see a very characteristic late one. And then you see one of the greatest of all, which is the woman with the silver jug. He's able, in the small canvas, to describe this entire world centered around this woman as she's doing her household chores in this beautiful light that illuminates the scene. The miracle of oil spread throughout Europe, from Titian and Raphael in Italy, De La Tour and Poussin in France, to Diego Velázquez in Spain. Every painter who's lived admires the way he handled a brush. While in Rome, Velázquez painted his Moorish servant as a warm-up exercise for a planned portrait of the Pope. He's actually stroking the canvas with the brush. He's not using even a palette in order to mix the colors. He mixed the colors directly on the canvas. Next to wear the mantle of master in Spain was court painter Francisco Goya. The child looks out kind of innocently. There is evil in the painting. You can see in the shadows these sinister eyes of these cats that want to jump on the birds and eat them. By the 18th century, the practice of oil painting had been nearly universal for 100 years. But artists working in America had some catching up to do.