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Many of you know, four years ago, the Metropolitan launched an ambitious project to replace the
skylights of all forty-four galleries of its collection of European paintings. We're halfway
through this project now. We've reopened twenty-one galleries with over 500 pictures. And we've
arranged these pictures in ways that I think will astonish you because of the thematic
grouping's dialogues across nations, prominence given to female artists, all sorts of questions
that accompany the great moment of European painting from the 14th to the 19th century.
The skylights have now been so revitalized that you will experience these pictures in
literally a new light. It's an occasion to reacquaint yourself with the collection and
to simply enjoy the Metropolitan Museum's offerings.
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Here we are in the gallery of 17th-century
French painting, not exclusively French painting, Rubens is in this gallery, the German artist
Goffredo Wals, landscapes. But the picture I'm standing in front of is one of the museum's
most celebrated, Caravaggio's musicians. It created a revolution because Caravaggio painted
directly from the models. Indeed, we can see Caravaggio himself in the background of this
picture. Artists flooded Rome throughout Europe and two of them are shown adjacent to this
picture. One is Valentin de Bologna. The other Simon Vouet. Simon Vouet arrived in Rome,
already an established artist, but he immediately recognized that the whole game had been changed
by Caravaggio. We're lucky that in the last few years we've been able to acquire this
beautiful picture of a woman playing guitar, probably a love song. Caravaggio was the determining
factor throughout France and nowhere more so than in the museum's great painting by
Georges de La Tour, in which a young man who is having his fortune told and while it's
being told he's being robbed and you can see the beautiful young woman with the black hair,
she's bemused by the whole scene. Pictures like this were part of the fame of Caravaggio.
Did Georges de La Tour actually go to Rome? He didn't need to because by this time, the
Caravaggio revolution was pervasive throughout Europe. So you'll see these pictures now in
a different way with conversations that reestablished the dynamics that characterized painting in
Europe in the 17th and 18th century.
We're in the 18th-century view painting, veduta
painting gallery, the Met's extraordinary collection of views of Venice, and on the
adjacent wall, are views of. domestic life in Venice. You travel through all the various
rooms of the aristocrats, as well as people waiting outside the Doge's Palace or in the
casino all masked up. It's a room in which we enter into Venetian life in the way that
a tourist in the 18th century would have done. And I think it's a real treat.
This space brings together a theatre of sketches that look both at the preparatory process, the
very complicated process of realizing a large painting on the one hand and on the other.
Making copies after that helped not only disseminate a famous work, but also served as a record
in an artist's studio. This corner shows a dramatic group of dynamic heads. These are
not portraits in that they're not trying to show a specific individual, but explorations
of emotion we see of the most alluring and extraordinary images by Van Dyke of a young
woman looking very melancholic, very inward. It's an image that the artist would later
work into a Holy Family. Other paintings show bold and dynamic faces of men that were used
in this instance by Rubens in religious and secular images. Borgianni here looks at a
wizened old woman in Rome, the kind of figure that would have been selling something in
the street and whether these were captured in vivo on the spot or later memories in the
studio, they certainly served as exercises both for the artist to explore and for the patron.
We're here in the middle of the suite of European paintings, galleries, in a gallery
that brings together the museum's extraordinary holdings of gold ground paintings. These paintings
used to be scattered around our galleries, and it's been truly a delight to see them
brought together and to see how the relationships bring out different aspects of the works of
art from the very first encounter between Western painters and Eastern icons. These
paintings are on panel, and many of them are fragments of larger ensembles, either in a
church or in a domestic setting. At the core of our gallery, we've installed a very important
altarpiece by Giovanni Di Paolo, the leading painter of 15th century Siena. And this painting
has just come down from a truly wonderful conservation treatment over the last year
and a half. You can see the extraordinary effects of the gold and the tooled surfaces,
if you look closely, you see marvelous and very carefully worked incisions or punch decoration,
which capture the light as it changes, but also as the beholder of these paintings moves
around the image. One of the pleasures of looking at the installation in this gallery
is to contemplate the exchange between narrative painting and the more static, iconic images.
The exploration of narrative comes beautifully together in this painting of the crucifixion
by Pietro Lorenzetti. This picture shows all of the aspects of this crowning moment of
Christ's life on earth. And one of the marvelous things about the installation is it allows
us to think about how these images were not fixed on a wall, were not part of a fixed
context. A painting of the scale would have been in the hands of a private patron, either
in their house or with them to return to and to meditate upon.
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This gallery is about having
a new conversation among our wonderful collection of 17th-century portraits. Previously, these
were all displayed in different galleries dedicated to different national schools. And
we have to remember that these were itinerant artists. They traveled from court to court,
city to city. Now we have a dialogue among different countries. So this is a conversation
that very much reflects what was actually happening in the time. This spectacular family
portrait shows the Flemish artist Peter Paul Reubens with his wife and one of their children.
He's not depicting himself as a humble craftsman. Instead, he's really portrayed himself and
his family as artistic royalty. This painting is all about luxurious textiles, jewels, the
beautiful garden of the palazzo that he built. And we've hung it here in this gallery, facing
another spectacular Baroque family portrait, that by Le Brun depicting the Jabach family.
The Jabach family portrait also includes an artistic self-portrait. If you look at the
mirror in the background, you see the artist himself at work on the canvas. We're given
a glimpse of the portrait sitting as it takes place. We've also put painting in dialogue
with sculpture so that you see how ideas about dramatic, expressive, grand portraiture were
translated between different media.
Historically, we've had two major shortcomings in our collection
of European painting here at the Met, notably still life and the work of women artists.
The wall behind me shows some of the steps that we've taken in recent years to address
those two gaps in the collection. We have a group of paintings that show a new richness
in still life painting and particularly revealing the pivotal role that women artists played
in the development of that genre. We have a wonderful flower painting by the Flemish
artist Clara Peeters, who is really a founding figure in the tradition of still life painting
in Europe. A very rare artist. We were very fortunate to be able to acquire this picture.
And then next to her we have a large picture of flowers and fruit by the Italian artist
Orsola Madalena Coccia and Coccia actually was a member of a convent, a religious order.
She supported the convent through her artistry. And so you have in this wall all different
kinds of still life. You have still life really as a devotional practice, but also as an expression
of scientific curiosity. And that's one theme that we're exploring with this group of still lifes as well.
This gallery is all about the international conversation surrounding what
we call history, painting scenes from the Bible, scenes from myth. One of the key debates
in 17th-century art at the time was between the followers of Rubens and the followers
of Poussin. Rubens represented the embrace of color, sensuality, earthiness, the painterliness
of paint. Poussin was all about a cerebral, intellectual approach to art, really grounded
in classical principles of design. We decided to create a whole gallery devoted to exploring
this binary, this debate, juxtaposing our wonderful pictures by presenting with a very
powerful wall of history paintings by Rubens. And you see how they charted really two alternate
courses that many of their followers would debate for centuries to come. You see all
of those factors at play in this new acquisition depicting the temptation of Mary Magdalene
painted by the artist Johann Liss, which is really about a woman torn between her heavenly
calling and the lure of the flesh. This is another gallery where we've created an international
conversation. Johann Liss, who trains in Antwerp and then spends most of his career in Italy.
We have a Flemish artist, Anthony Van Dyke, painting works that emulate what he saw in
Venice. And then we have the artist, Sébastien Bourdon, a French painter, but very much influenced
by Venetian painting. So you're really traversing the whole of Europe. We want to show that
these were artists who traveled. They were artists who competed with each other, who
exchanged ideas. And that's something you really see through this new conversation that
we've created in this gallery devoted to baroque history painting.
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