In November, the Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened its suite of 45 galleries dedicated to European paintings from 1300 to 1800 following an extensive five-year renovation of the overhead skylights that admit natural light. The museum has fortunately avoided the thin, ahistorical this-looks-like-that school of curation and delivers thoughtful and engaging thematic and cultural narratives.
Herewith, 10 highlights everyone ought to revisit. (I was mildly embarrassed—worried?—to discover that half of my selections revolve around grisly depictions of violence and death. But with nearly 500 European wars fought between 1500 and 1800, I will blame the period.)
1.
Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Martyrdom of Saint Barbara, circa 1510
According to legend, Barbara was the beautiful daughter of the doting lunatic Dioscorus, who kept her locked away from all but her pagan teachers. When she embraced Christianity and refused marriage, he had her beheaded—and did the honors himself.
Cranach’s woodcut of the execution (circa 1509) is pure horror; his oil is far more interesting. The deep and varied palette, the lushness of the fabrics and ornamental flourishes, and the geometric precision together heighten the effect of the malevolent Roman quartet, Dioscorus’s shocking act, and Barbara’s stoicism. There is much to see, not least the creeping root ends of the tree at the upper right, which seem to anticipate the cleavage.
2.
Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano), Portrait of a Young Man, 1530s
One day I will write an article for an obscure journal about Bronzino and the languorous, half-opened eyelid. There is no other master whose subjects appear never to have experienced anxiety, doubt, or humility. The Young Man of the Met portrait is the personification of irritating good fortune: the handsome, untroubled brow, the ruffles and ramrod posture, the you-caught-me-reading affect. (“Petrarch—ever heard of him … ?”) The interior is gentle curves, straight lines, and soft, harmonious shades. But do not be deceived: the pair of grotesque carvings on the table and armrest augur darker thoughts and prospects for the sitter.
3.
Jacques de Gheyn II, Vanitas Still Life, 1603
A haunting arrangement reckoned “the earliest known independent still-life painting of a vanitas subject, or symbolic depiction of human vanity,” Vanitas Still Life is more than 400 years old, yet its iconography needs little modern explanation. The coins arrayed at the lower edge, the flower vases—one full, one empty—in the lower corners, and the scorn and sorrow of the pre-Socratic philosophers Democritus and Heracleitus signify worldly futility and transience. It is not strictly heavy browns and hard metals, however; at the center of the composition floats the bubble of human folly. (O.K., the wheel of torture and leper’s rattle will, one hopes, require some translation.)
4.
Anthony van Dyck, Self-Portrait, circa 1620–21
Among the truly outstanding self-portraits in European art of any era, Van Dyck’s twentysomething likeness leans back comfortably and fingers his collar, cutting an enormously romantic figure two centuries before Romanticism. The seven-foot aristocratic commission hanging to its right—Van Dyck’s grand portrait of James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, from the early 1630s—allows one to appreciate fully the self-portrait’s inviting scale and expressiveness. The artist’s pallor and the dimness and indeterminacy of his surroundings make his eyes all the more startling. The left iris is blue, the right is an olive green. The result is hypnotic.
5.
Nicolas Poussin, The Abduction of the Sabine Women, probably 1633–34
Francis Bacon came across Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents (circa 1628–29) at Chantilly’s Musée Condé in his teens and for the rest of his life exalted and found inspiration in what he regarded as “the best human cry ever painted.” The Abduction of the Sabine Women, formerly in the collections of the French ambassador to Rome and Cardinal Richelieu—one wonders what the latter liked best about it—might, too, have fired Bacon’s youthful imagination. The brilliant colors, stately classical backdrop, and noble musculature cannot conceal the rapacious dimension of the Roman imperial project and an exceptionally twisted founding myth.
6.
Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée), The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet, circa 1643
Claude transports the viewer to Book V of Virgil’s Aeneid, when the weary Trojan women attempt to burn the fleet in order to halt their interminable wandering and remain in Sicily. The storm that will preserve the ships is suggested in the gathering clouds at upper right. (Note the unsettling juxtaposition between the upbeat resolution on the shore and disbelieving howls from the water.) The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet is an extraordinary pendant to Poussin’s earlier Abduction, with the Trojan women essaying an alternative, presumably brighter, more peaceful future for Rome. The Sabines would undoubtedly have preferred the Trojan women got their way.
7.
Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez), Juan de Pareja, 1650
Christie’s has sold many masterpieces since its founding, in 1766; Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja is arguably the finest. First offered at Christie’s in London during the Napoleonic Wars—the canvas arrived at King Street by way of Admiral Nelson’s flagship, H.M.S. Foudroyant—it belonged to the second through eighth Earls of Radnor until its mind-boggling sale, in November 1970. If you don’t believe me, you can take art critic Richard Cork’s word for it:
The atmosphere was extraordinary. The bidding outflew all expectations. It started at £315,000, and took just 130 seconds. It was finally knocked down for a staggering £2,310,000, almost tripling the previous world auction record for a painting. Even the most hardened dealers sitting in the audience breathed gasps of disbelief. Then there was a spontaneous burst of applause. The auctioneer left his rostrum, the painting was hastily removed, and sheer pandemonium broke out.
The Met was the buyer. As for the portrait’s dazzling merits, they are surely self-evident.
8.
Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653
There is nothing like Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. (Its sale at Parke-Bernet, in 1961, was equally historic; I prefer the more evocative title Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer.) Aristotle gazes into the middle distance and rests his hand on the poet’s head. The bust—on which Rembrandt places his signature—has an ethereal quality at odds with the heavy gold chain and pendant hanging from Aristotle’s shoulder. We perceive his pupil, Alexander’s profile in miniature; the Homer Aristotle stands over is unknowable.
9.
Jacques Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787
David’s The Death of Socrates is the best that neoclassicism has to offer: the superb choreography, the historical care, the moral purpose. In reproduction, Socrates’s righteous index finger and the sobbing protests of his disciples—is Plato sleeping?—might be confused for the histrionics of silent film. In person, it is gripping. The Met acquired The Death of Socrates through Walter Pach, who helped to assemble the Armory Show.
10.
Henry Fuseli, The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches, 1796
I was tempted to conclude with John Trumbull’s The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar (1789), as much for its uncanny flickering light as its New World orientation, but I settled on Fuseli’s gray, irresistibly titled nightmare, The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches. Fuseli’s is an authentically frightening sensibility, and if The Night-Hag won’t set you racing to Milton, it may to the gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.
The Met’s new European galleries are now open to visitors
Max Carter is vice-chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie’s in New York