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The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings
In line with best-selling The All the Paintings , and Rizzoli's successful The Hermitage Collections and The Barnes Masterworks , this title offers an exquisite tour, unique in its lavish illustration, scholarship, extent, and graceful packaging. As the first large survey published in 30 years, and the first large general survey of the Met's paintings collection it is the first to celebrate the greatest and most iconic paintings of one of the largest, most important, and most beloved museums in the world. This impressive book’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 this world-renowned institution. 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. For those wishing to experience the Met’s unparalleled collection or to study masterpieces of painting from throughout history, this important volume is sure to become a classic cherished by art lovers around the world. Iconic works in the Met Sargent's Madame X, Velazquez Juan de Pareja, Brueghel The Harvesters, Van Gogh Cypresses; Rembrandt Aristotle and Bust of Homer; Pollock Autumn Rhythm; Emanuel Leutz George Washington Crossing the Delaware; El Greco View of Toledo; Caravaggio Musicians; Vermeer Young Woman with Water Pitcher; Monet Water Lilies; Picasso Seated Harlequin.
- GenresArtNonfiction
544 pages, Hardcover
Published September 13, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 9, 2024
I am in grad school, and I commute there from my parents' house, in which I've been living again for the past three years or so. Two years ago I got a part-time position alongside my studies as a little bureaucrat at the university, but my checking and savings accounts show today more or less the same as what they showed back then. Since my genuinely lovely parents have been humane enough not to charge me rent as long as I Am Doing Something With My Life (Something whose value is currently measured by expected financial ROI, alas), and since the fridge in our kitchen is usually stocked by 'the grocery fairy' as my mother sometimes calls herself, my basic needs are secured for this arc of my life. Therefore—if saving for my independent financial future is disregarded, and it has been, alas—all of my income is disposable until I leave this house.
My pay is meager but month after month of meagerness snowballed into something sufficient enough to provide me the means to assemble a little library at home, down in the basement in which I pleasantly dwell. 'Little' is a bit cute; it's rather medium-sized (for an individual). I liked the idea of being able to cultivate oneself with extreme adequacy within the boundaries of a house, without ever having to leave. Although the importance of being outside or in the gym constantly enough or of playing tennis in summer became increasingly important as time went on. A healthy synthesis of physical-mental cultivation has been achieved at this point, I am glad to say.
The 'mental' aspect of that synthesis—which overall is more profound and important than the physical, although they are of course not entirely separate—is itself manifold. That manifold includes several streams of cultivation, three of which we could name 'philosophical', 'aesthetic', and 'ethical'—although they are of course not entirely separate. Not at all.
In order to make the 'aesthetic' stream of cultivation flow further in particular my bank account was emptied on behalf of art books. You may say, can't you cultivate aesthetically on the Computer? Yes you can, and yes I have, and this is a complex problematic field but with regard to images there is something insufficient about them insofar as they are-on-a-screen. I may be mistaken but the objectivity of a digital image represents to me some of the least objectivity an object can have while remaining an object. The monitor has genuine solidity and full objectivity and it occupies space. But the digital image is like a mere ethereal surface phenomenon, a haze. That's hyperbolic but there's something lacking about it. Yet, when it's printed out (an experiment you could try for yourself, as you wish), its concretion, its full-bodied objectivity strikes one as if for the first time; the phenomenological difference in the experience of the artwork is immense, at least for me. What is interesting is that the printed out image is still extremely flat, being printed on paper. Yet this flatness is actually less 'flat' (in a bad sense) and more spatial indeed than the flatness of the digital image. There is something misleading in digital ‘flatness’— it's a pseudo-flatness, somehow, a caricature of real flat spatiality. I may be mistaken.
And that isn't even touching the problem that it can be very difficult or impossible even to find high-quality images of artworks online. For that we will have to wait for Google Art Project (now 'Google Arts and Culture') to expand its dominion.
Therefore I found it necessary to drain further and acquire art books. My bank account never had a chance. Some of the books are titled thematically, like Renaissance 1420-1600, Baroque 1600-1780, Erotic Art, European Painting 1750-1880, Indian Art, American Painting, Art Africa. And some simply seek to capture the work of a single individual artist like Hokusai, Hiroshige, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, or Jackson Pollock. My favorites are the ones which seek to hold an entire museum in the palm of your hand: MoMA NOW, Musée d'Orsay, The Hermitage Collections, The Louvre: All the Paintings, the Vatican: All the Paintings, Florence: [All] the Paintings and Frescoes, the Prado. And of course this one, the Met: Masterpiece Paintings.
A lot more is possible in a house than we have heretofore believed, especially if certain acquisitions can be made. All of us who dwell in one need to explore the almost inexhaustible immanence actually of a house.
Like if you arrange your art books correctly at your bedside table and perhaps bookmark the proper paths of pieces ahead of time, you can visit very special exhibitions with excellent historical company, as long as you bring the right texts. You can peruse and dialogue at the Salon of 1765 and of 1767 with Diderot, at the Salon of 1845 and of 1846 and of 1859 with Baudelaire. And also, you can pierce deeply (if not entirely) through the impoverishment of late modern experience identified by the Frankfurt School (among others) and confronted in a book by Agamben titled aptly Infancy and History: on the Destruction of Experience. Your saber is psychedelics. Or rather a rapier, in the case of psilocybin, the very best item for these purposes (decriminalized by the way in a landslide in Washington, D.C.'s directly-democratic Initiative 81), a rapier because of the fullness of the ensuing emotion, its penetrating intelligence, simple and clean, the euphoric pulsation of virtue, its excellence, its elegance, unmatched. The feeling of power and joy identified by Deleuze in ABC 'J', of finally having all of your resources at your disposal. The will to power. Not a reflexive relation to oneself of reflecting back upon oneself and judging self-consciously that one is happy, but rather simply the boundless joy of being who and what one is, of 'having arrived where one is'. We decadent scholars of the twenty-first century arrived at the splendid place that we are through diligence and ceaseless cultivation, and we will not stop: 'We do our practice again and again. We sit and meditate again and again and again. We sit, we practice, we sit, we practice. We continue to confront our emotions and everything else. It is a long summer.' Did you know this was possible on your Body without Organs? Psilocybin. Or ketamine and cannabis. The generosity of which Life and the World is capable can be astounding. Immanence; movement. 'On a thousand bridges and paths they shall throng to the future'; 'Life wants to climb and overcome itself climbing.' Higher and higher and higher. 'When you work with neuroses, you clean them up.' 'It is one piece, which is very precise and good, healthy and wholesome. Therefore, you are no longer subject to obstacles or hazards of any kind.'
Taking psychedelics and leaving the house and going to a full spatial real museum is still certainly worthwhile but can be challenging because of the presence of everyone else, among other things. And you are limited to whichever museums just so happen to exist within the contingent geographical circumference of your existence. Also you can't dance in a museum, or maybe you could, but everyone would look at you weird and you may get thrown out by security. And also you can't drink wine in a museum outside but you can do it at home at the Salon of 1846 with Baudelaire, who probably actually broke that rule and is intoxicated too. And that is quite nice too, but to return to psychedelics: at home in my basement in my library or bedroom I can use them and enjoy some of the greatest, most royal aesthetic experiences possible in this bad epoch, with impunity. Immersing into the magical balmy night of Primavera with Venus, Flora, and Hermes. Now two men get to be there. The Three Graces linking fingers under a canopy of inky leaves and oranges. Eros, don't shoot me (or maybe actually do!)! Or crying over literature, like The Dream of the Red Chamber and how Lin Daiyu struggles not to implode from the force of the impossible sweetness she cannot express, which won't stop pushing up against the frail boundary of her wispy willowy body, and her respiratory ailment, and how she has to repay Baoyu with tears. I have a very cool relationship with my parents, a historical relationship only possible in the 2020s (I may be mistaken). Therefore some degree of Confucian filial piety remains called for, although adjusted for Things That Have Happened Since Then, two and a half millennia ago, in the 'Spring and Autumn Period' of its distinctly philosophical origin.
'The drug effect first became known to me as a shift of colors toward golden and rose tones. Pigments in the room became intensified. Shapes became rounder, more organic. A sensation of lightness and rivulets of warmth began seeping through my body. Bright lights began pulsing and flashing behind my closed lids. I began to perceive waves of energy flowing through all of us in unison. I saw all of us as a gridwork of electrical energy beings, nodes on a bright, pulsating network of light. Then the interior landscape shifted into broader scenes. Daliesque vistas were patterned with eyes of Horus, brocades of geometric design began shifting and changing through radiant patterns of light. It was an artist's paradise—representing virtually the full pantheon of the history of art.'
My pay is meager but month after month of meagerness snowballed into something sufficient enough to provide me the means to assemble a little library at home, down in the basement in which I pleasantly dwell. 'Little' is a bit cute; it's rather medium-sized (for an individual). I liked the idea of being able to cultivate oneself with extreme adequacy within the boundaries of a house, without ever having to leave. Although the importance of being outside or in the gym constantly enough or of playing tennis in summer became increasingly important as time went on. A healthy synthesis of physical-mental cultivation has been achieved at this point, I am glad to say.
The 'mental' aspect of that synthesis—which overall is more profound and important than the physical, although they are of course not entirely separate—is itself manifold. That manifold includes several streams of cultivation, three of which we could name 'philosophical', 'aesthetic', and 'ethical'—although they are of course not entirely separate. Not at all.
In order to make the 'aesthetic' stream of cultivation flow further in particular my bank account was emptied on behalf of art books. You may say, can't you cultivate aesthetically on the Computer? Yes you can, and yes I have, and this is a complex problematic field but with regard to images there is something insufficient about them insofar as they are-on-a-screen. I may be mistaken but the objectivity of a digital image represents to me some of the least objectivity an object can have while remaining an object. The monitor has genuine solidity and full objectivity and it occupies space. But the digital image is like a mere ethereal surface phenomenon, a haze. That's hyperbolic but there's something lacking about it. Yet, when it's printed out (an experiment you could try for yourself, as you wish), its concretion, its full-bodied objectivity strikes one as if for the first time; the phenomenological difference in the experience of the artwork is immense, at least for me. What is interesting is that the printed out image is still extremely flat, being printed on paper. Yet this flatness is actually less 'flat' (in a bad sense) and more spatial indeed than the flatness of the digital image. There is something misleading in digital ‘flatness’— it's a pseudo-flatness, somehow, a caricature of real flat spatiality. I may be mistaken.
And that isn't even touching the problem that it can be very difficult or impossible even to find high-quality images of artworks online. For that we will have to wait for Google Art Project (now 'Google Arts and Culture') to expand its dominion.
Therefore I found it necessary to drain further and acquire art books. My bank account never had a chance. Some of the books are titled thematically, like Renaissance 1420-1600, Baroque 1600-1780, Erotic Art, European Painting 1750-1880, Indian Art, American Painting, Art Africa. And some simply seek to capture the work of a single individual artist like Hokusai, Hiroshige, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, or Jackson Pollock. My favorites are the ones which seek to hold an entire museum in the palm of your hand: MoMA NOW, Musée d'Orsay, The Hermitage Collections, The Louvre: All the Paintings, the Vatican: All the Paintings, Florence: [All] the Paintings and Frescoes, the Prado. And of course this one, the Met: Masterpiece Paintings.
A lot more is possible in a house than we have heretofore believed, especially if certain acquisitions can be made. All of us who dwell in one need to explore the almost inexhaustible immanence actually of a house.
Like if you arrange your art books correctly at your bedside table and perhaps bookmark the proper paths of pieces ahead of time, you can visit very special exhibitions with excellent historical company, as long as you bring the right texts. You can peruse and dialogue at the Salon of 1765 and of 1767 with Diderot, at the Salon of 1845 and of 1846 and of 1859 with Baudelaire. And also, you can pierce deeply (if not entirely) through the impoverishment of late modern experience identified by the Frankfurt School (among others) and confronted in a book by Agamben titled aptly Infancy and History: on the Destruction of Experience. Your saber is psychedelics. Or rather a rapier, in the case of psilocybin, the very best item for these purposes (decriminalized by the way in a landslide in Washington, D.C.'s directly-democratic Initiative 81), a rapier because of the fullness of the ensuing emotion, its penetrating intelligence, simple and clean, the euphoric pulsation of virtue, its excellence, its elegance, unmatched. The feeling of power and joy identified by Deleuze in ABC 'J', of finally having all of your resources at your disposal. The will to power. Not a reflexive relation to oneself of reflecting back upon oneself and judging self-consciously that one is happy, but rather simply the boundless joy of being who and what one is, of 'having arrived where one is'. We decadent scholars of the twenty-first century arrived at the splendid place that we are through diligence and ceaseless cultivation, and we will not stop: 'We do our practice again and again. We sit and meditate again and again and again. We sit, we practice, we sit, we practice. We continue to confront our emotions and everything else. It is a long summer.' Did you know this was possible on your Body without Organs? Psilocybin. Or ketamine and cannabis. The generosity of which Life and the World is capable can be astounding. Immanence; movement. 'On a thousand bridges and paths they shall throng to the future'; 'Life wants to climb and overcome itself climbing.' Higher and higher and higher. 'When you work with neuroses, you clean them up.' 'It is one piece, which is very precise and good, healthy and wholesome. Therefore, you are no longer subject to obstacles or hazards of any kind.'
Taking psychedelics and leaving the house and going to a full spatial real museum is still certainly worthwhile but can be challenging because of the presence of everyone else, among other things. And you are limited to whichever museums just so happen to exist within the contingent geographical circumference of your existence. Also you can't dance in a museum, or maybe you could, but everyone would look at you weird and you may get thrown out by security. And also you can't drink wine in a museum outside but you can do it at home at the Salon of 1846 with Baudelaire, who probably actually broke that rule and is intoxicated too. And that is quite nice too, but to return to psychedelics: at home in my basement in my library or bedroom I can use them and enjoy some of the greatest, most royal aesthetic experiences possible in this bad epoch, with impunity. Immersing into the magical balmy night of Primavera with Venus, Flora, and Hermes. Now two men get to be there. The Three Graces linking fingers under a canopy of inky leaves and oranges. Eros, don't shoot me (or maybe actually do!)! Or crying over literature, like The Dream of the Red Chamber and how Lin Daiyu struggles not to implode from the force of the impossible sweetness she cannot express, which won't stop pushing up against the frail boundary of her wispy willowy body, and her respiratory ailment, and how she has to repay Baoyu with tears. I have a very cool relationship with my parents, a historical relationship only possible in the 2020s (I may be mistaken). Therefore some degree of Confucian filial piety remains called for, although adjusted for Things That Have Happened Since Then, two and a half millennia ago, in the 'Spring and Autumn Period' of its distinctly philosophical origin.
'The drug effect first became known to me as a shift of colors toward golden and rose tones. Pigments in the room became intensified. Shapes became rounder, more organic. A sensation of lightness and rivulets of warmth began seeping through my body. Bright lights began pulsing and flashing behind my closed lids. I began to perceive waves of energy flowing through all of us in unison. I saw all of us as a gridwork of electrical energy beings, nodes on a bright, pulsating network of light. Then the interior landscape shifted into broader scenes. Daliesque vistas were patterned with eyes of Horus, brocades of geometric design began shifting and changing through radiant patterns of light. It was an artist's paradise—representing virtually the full pantheon of the history of art.'
June 20, 2025
forever thinking of afternoons in the metropolitan museum of art and the met cloisters <3 my art history obsession is forever. reading this in preparation for my annual visit to the metropolitan museum of art!!
January 19, 2020
Like another reviewer has mentioned, I found it a little odd that pieces that are certainly not "paintings" (ancient pottery, primarily) were included in this collection – pottery and sacred objects deserve their own book, not to be shoe-horned into this one. But the prints of the works are gorgeous, the large-format allows for more detail to be observed, and I appreciate the way this book is organized. The write-ups for each piece are well-written. As an artist, this is a valuable resource.
January 19, 2019
The author suggests that some storage jars from 4,000 years ago are masterpiece paintings, which is utterly ridiculous. Thankfully, she has included a large selection of truly breathtaking works worth revisiting. It's just a shame thinking about the "other" masterpieces that were excluded due to a few really old jars.
November 12, 2025
Definitely my most precious possession right now! So happy with this book, and every time I look into it, I feel so happy… that feeling when you want to cry every time you see beautiful artwork.
Like other reviewers, I was a little bit disappointed when I see a lot of pots in the book, but then… what is a “painting”? After reading the foreword from the author, I think she has done a great job in putting this book together.
Though I feel like the book is only a representation of the museum, and only a few artwork from any artists being displayed, but I supposed there is no way for anyone to put ALL artworks from ALL artist in one single book. So, I think the author has done a great job!
The pictures are all in great quality, with only little text to explain the artwork (in a separate location). So you can just enjoy the artwork fully, and go to the explanation for any artwork that you are interested in. Great job!!
I have a dream of going to MET and now I feel like part of that dream has come true.
Definitely my most precious possession at the moment!
Like other reviewers, I was a little bit disappointed when I see a lot of pots in the book, but then… what is a “painting”? After reading the foreword from the author, I think she has done a great job in putting this book together.
Though I feel like the book is only a representation of the museum, and only a few artwork from any artists being displayed, but I supposed there is no way for anyone to put ALL artworks from ALL artist in one single book. So, I think the author has done a great job!
The pictures are all in great quality, with only little text to explain the artwork (in a separate location). So you can just enjoy the artwork fully, and go to the explanation for any artwork that you are interested in. Great job!!
I have a dream of going to MET and now I feel like part of that dream has come true.
Definitely my most precious possession at the moment!
June 20, 2025
forever thinking of afternoons in the metropolitan museum of art and the met cloisters <3 my art history obsession is forever. reading this in preparation for my annual visit to the metropolitan museum of art!!
January 7, 2019
Magnificent illustrations of paintings from The Met. Love the format of how the interpretations are at the end of the chapters.
March 3, 2021
I have to read it again and again and again
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews