The Metropolitan Museum was founded in 1870 with no building and not a single object in it. A group of New York lawyers, bankers and artists decided the city needed a museum on the scale of Europe's great museums, rented rooms on Fifth Avenue and started buying paintings and antiquities. The first thing to enter the collection was a Roman sarcophagus, a gift from the American consul on Cyprus. The museum now holds around two million objects, from flint tools to work by Jackson Pollock, and seeing all of it in one visit is physically impossible.
We will take you through fifteen works to prioritize if your time is limited. We start with an Egyptian temple built under Augustus and finish with a Congolese figure from the end of the 19th century.
1. The Temple of Dendur
In 1968 a cargo ship docked in Brooklyn carrying Italian cheese, canned tomatoes, jars of cocktail cherries and an ancient Egyptian temple. Dendur traveled in the hold in more than 640 crates. Its sandstone blocks weighed over 800 tons.
Dozens of names and dates are cut into the temple walls. Europeans working their way up the Nile in the 19th century left them there, since carving your signature into an ancient monument was ordinary tourist behavior at the time, and Dendur collected an unusual number of them.
The temple was built around 10 BC and dedicated to Isis, worshipped in Egypt as the wife of Osiris and protector of the dead, whose cult had spread by Roman times across the whole Mediterranean and as far as Rome itself. Alongside her it honoured two local brothers, Pedesi and Pihor, sons of a Nubian chieftain who drowned in the Nile. Egyptians regarded the drowned as marked by the water and close to the gods, so the brothers became local deities after their death and the temple was built beside their grave.
Walk in through the gate and you come first to an open court under the sky, then a portico with columns, then an offering hall, and at the very back the sanctuary that held the image of the god. The floor rose as you went deeper, the ceiling came down, the light thinned out and the rooms narrowed. Almost every Egyptian temple was built this way, because the building represented the journey from the outside world to the god's own house, and at the end of that journey there were no visitors left, only priests.
The reliefs by the entrance show a ruler in the double crown presenting offerings and burning incense, in exactly the poses used for pharaohs for the previous fifteen centuries. That ruler is the Roman emperor Augustus, under whom the temple was built. Rome took Egypt in 30 BC, after Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra, and in local sanctuaries the country's new owner stepped into the role of its old kings, since an Egyptian temple needed a pharaoh making offerings and a Roman emperor in a toga would have been no use in that role.
In the 1960s Egypt began building the Aswan High Dam, and the water was going to cover this whole stretch of the valley along with dozens of monuments. UNESCO launched an international campaign to save them, the United States contributed a great deal of money, and in 1965 Egypt gave Dendur to the Americans in return. Egyptian conservators had already taken the temple apart block by block two years earlier. American cities then spent two years competing for the gift, each with its own proposal, until President Lyndon Johnson awarded the temple to the Met in 1967.
Reassembly took a long time and relied on two sets of markings, the numbers the Egyptians painted on the blocks before dismantling in 1963 and the marks left by the ancient masons who had put the temple up in the first place. The stone was soaked in water along the way. The sandstone had absorbed salts over two thousand years beside the river, and salts of that kind crystallize near the surface and lift it off in flakes, so without the soaking the reliefs could have crumbled through their first New York summer.
Dendur opened to the public in September 1978, in a new wing with a glass wall facing Central Park. A shallow pool stands in front of it in place of the Nile, and a sloping wall behind it stands in for the cliffs against which it had stood for two millennia.
2. Han Gan. Night-Shining White
The horse is tied to a post and fighting the rope. One foreleg is up, the head is twisted away, the tether is taut, the eye is wide open and the nostril flared. The dark strokes gather around the head, mane and legs, and the body is left largely unpainted.
Night-Shining White was the name of a white horse belonging to the emperor Xuanzong, who ruled China in the first half of the 8th century. Horses from the imperial stables took part in court ceremony, the best of them were known by name, and their portraits were commissioned much as portraits of people were.
The drawing is attributed to Han Gan, a court painter of the same period who worked almost exclusively on horses. There is a legend about how he learned. The emperor instructed him to take lessons from a famous horse painter, and Han Gan declined, answering that he already had teachers, the horses in the imperial stables, and that he went to look at them himself. Later Chinese critics repeated the story to explain why his horses came out heavy and fleshy instead of the elegant animals that had been the fashion before him.
The drawing itself measures only 31 by 34 centimeters. The scroll into which it is mounted runs to more than 11 meters. It reached that length over the 900 years after the drawing was made. Each new owner added a few lines along the side about how the work had come into his possession and what he thought of it, stamped his name beside them in red, and when the space ran out another sheet of paper was pasted on. That is how the 11 meters accumulated. The horse occupies about one-thirtieth of the total length.
A handscroll like this was viewed on a table, unrolled from right to left, one hand opening the next stretch while the other rolled up what had been seen, which meant nobody ever looked at the whole thing at once, the owner included. The inscriptions were read in the same order as the painting, so each collector first learned who had owned the scroll before him and then wrote himself in at the end. Among those names is the emperor Qianlong, who assembled the largest collection of Chinese painting in the 18th century and used his seals liberally.
A European collector who signed his name across a masterpiece would have damaged it and cut its value. With this scroll the reverse held true, and the more names it carried the more it was worth, because the names showed whose hands it had passed through. Those same marks are what scholars use to reconstruct its history.
3. Duccio di Buoninsegna. Madonna and Child
In 2004 the Met paid around 45 million dollars for a painting the size of a sheet of writing paper. It remains the most expensive purchase in the museum's history, and the panel is 28 centimeters high.
Duccio painted it around 1300. He was the leading painter in Siena at the time, still working in the Byzantine manner with gold grounds and elongated figures. The Madonna holds the child, and the child has reached up and pushed aside the edge of her veil to look into her face. Before Duccio, Italian madonnas sat upright and looked straight ahead, neither touching the child nor meeting his eyes. Here the child behaves like a child, and European painting's long history of depicting motherhood begins with that gesture.
The panel was made for private use. Small pictures of this kind were commissioned for personal prayer and kept in the owner's own room. Soot marks and areas of charring survive along the bottom edge of the frame, left by the candles set in front of it over the centuries.
Until 2004 the painting was known only to specialists. In the 20th century it belonged to the Belgian financier Adolphe Stoclet, the man for whom the architect Josef Hoffmann built the famous Brussels house with mosaics by Klimt, and it hung there for nearly a hundred years out of public view. Stoclet's heirs sold it to the museum directly.
Fewer than twenty works by Duccio survive anywhere, and almost all of them are in Europe. This is the only one in the Western Hemisphere.
4. Sultan Muhammad. The Feast of Sada
The Shahnameh, the Persian epic of the kings, contains an episode about how people got fire. King Hushang was walking in the mountains with his retinue when he saw a black serpent with eyes of flame on a rock. He picked up a stone and threw it at the serpent, which dodged and slipped away between the boulders, and the stone struck the rock face and threw off a spark that set the grass alight. Until that day people had no fire and no way of making it. Hushang saw where flame came from, declared that God had shown him a gift, and held a feast that same evening. Persians have marked the midwinter festival of Sada with bonfires ever since.
On the painting that fire occupies a small patch off to one side, easy to miss if you do not know the story. Almost all the remaining space is given over to the mountains, which rise one behind another and push out past the rectangular frame, to courtiers, to servants preparing food, to conversations in the corners and to animals tucked into the rocks where you do not spot them at once. The serpent that started the whole thing disappears among the crags completely.
This is a page from a book. The manuscript was made for Shah Tahmasp in Tabriz from the 1520s onward, with calligraphers copying the text, painters making the miniatures and separate specialists handling the paper, the ornament, the gold and the binding, and the work continued for about twenty years. The result was 759 pages, 258 of them illustrated, the most lavish Persian manuscript known to us. Sultan Muhammad was one of the book's principal artists, and The Feast of Sada is one of his pages.
In 1568 Tahmasp sent the book to Istanbul as a gift for Sultan Selim II. The embassy traveled with 34 camels laden with gifts, among them a Koran, porcelain, textiles and carpets, and the Shahnameh was among them.
The manuscript stayed in the library of the Topkapı Palace until the 20th century, passed to the Rothschilds, and was bought in 1959 by the American industrialist and collector Arthur Houghton. He cut the binding and began selling the book off page by page, since the pages were worth more separately than the manuscript was whole. In 1972 Houghton gave the Met 78 of them, sold others at auction, and everything that remained in his possession went back to Iran in 1994 under an exchange in which the Iranian side handed over a painting by Willem de Kooning.
5. Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Harvest
Nine people are eating lunch under a pear tree. A white cloth is spread on the ground with bowls, bread, spoons and a large earthenware jug on it. Some are eating, some drinking, a woman is passing a piece of bread to the man beside her, and one man lies flat on his back with his legs sprawled and his hat pulled over his face, fast asleep after the meal.
An enormous field surrounds them. The wheat stands in a wall taller than a man with passages cut through it, men move along them with scythes, women gather what has been cut and bind the sheaves, someone hauls a bundle down the slope on his shoulder. Beyond the field there is a village with a church, beyond the village orchards and ponds where people are swimming and playing, and at the horizon a few strokes of paint make ships in a harbor.
The Harvest was painted in 1565 for Niclaes Jongelinck, an Antwerp merchant who traded with Italy and had a country house outside the city. Jongelinck commissioned a cycle of large panels on the seasons, six of them, one for every two months of the year: a winter hunt, an overcast day in early spring, the haymaking, the harvest, the return of the herds in autumn and a second winter scene. All six hung in one room, so their owner walked past the other five seasons all year round whatever the weather outside. He collected seriously, and had sixteen Bruegels in the house.
He enjoyed that room for a year. In 1566 Jongelinck stood surety to the city of Antwerp for the debt of an acquaintance who collected the city's taxes, putting up his entire collection as security. The acquaintance failed to pay and the city took the paintings.
Five of the six panels have survived. Three hang in Vienna, one in Prague and one in New York.
6. El Greco. View of Toledo
In Toledo the cathedral stands to the right of the royal fortress, the Alcázar. In this painting El Greco moved it to the left, nearer the river, so that both buildings could be seen in full. He made no secret of it. A drawing of the same city survives with a note in his hand explaining that the tower would otherwise have blocked the view.
He painted the View of Toledo around 1600. Green hills under a black and blue sky with a storm coming across it, white flashes of light on the walls, the river Tagus curving below the town, a bridge running up to the gates. There is not a single human figure in the landscape.
For Spain at that date a painting like this was almost unthinkable. Landscape did not exist there as a genre in its own right, Spanish patrons bought altarpieces and portraits, and landscape views came from the Netherlands. El Greco, a Greek from Crete who trained in Venice and settled in Toledo in 1577, made only two of them, and the second, showing the city together with a plan of its streets, stayed in Toledo.
Who the painting was made for is unknown. The inventory of the artist's possessions drawn up after his death in 1614 lists a view of Toledo, and the record stops there.
It reached New York in 1929 under the will of Louisine Havemeyer, an American collector who bought Spanish painting while the taste for it in America was only beginning. We come back to Louisine and to where her collection came from later on, at Manet.
7. Diego Velázquez. Portrait of Juan de Pareja
Juan de Pareja was born around 1608 in Antequera in southern Spain, was of African descent, and was enslaved to Velázquez. In 17th-century Spanish workshops this was unremarkable. Enslaved people ground pigments, primed canvases and prepared brushes, and workshop inventories list them alongside the buckets and stretchers.
In 1649 Velázquez traveled to Italy to buy paintings and antique sculpture for Philip IV and took Pareja with him. They were there for over two years, and the portrait was painted in Rome early in 1650. Velázquez showed it that March in the Pantheon, where an exhibition was held every year for the feast of St Joseph and painters hung their work for anyone to see. The portrait was noticed and talked about, and a few months later Velázquez was admitted to the Roman Academy of St Luke, which was not easy for a foreigner.
A man in a worn gray doublet with a white collar turns his head slightly and looks straight ahead. The background is empty, with nothing beside him to explain who he is or what he does.
Antonio Palomino, a Spanish painter who wrote a book on the lives of Spanish artists half a century later and remains the main source on Velázquez, records what people were saying in Rome: everything else in the exhibition was painting, and this was truth. He also tells a story about how Velázquez tested the likeness before the exhibition. He sent Pareja round the houses of his Roman acquaintances carrying the canvas, and Pareja would present himself at the door holding the portrait up, leaving the man who opened it briefly unsure which of the two to look at.
Palomino has a second story, this one about Pareja himself. A slave had no business picking up a brush, so Pareja taught himself to paint in secret at night, watching how his master worked. When one of his paintings turned out well enough, he turned it to face the wall among other canvases in a room where Philip IV was due to come, and waited. The king arrived, turned the picture around, asked whose it was, and Pareja threw himself at his feet and confessed. Philip looked at the canvas and told Velázquez that a man who painted like that should not be a slave.
Whether any of this happened is unknown. What survives is a document signed in Rome on 23 November 1650 granting Pareja his freedom after four more years of service. In 1654 he became a free man, started working on his own and taking large commissions. In 1661 he painted The Calling of Saint Matthew, nearly three meters wide, and put himself into the left-hand side of it, away from the main action, the one figure looking straight out at the viewer. He is holding a sheet of paper with his name on it.
8. Rembrandt. Aristotle with a Bust of Homer
The painting was made to order, and the order came from Sicily. In 1652 Don Antonio Ruffo, a nobleman of Messina with more than a thousand paintings in his house, wrote to Amsterdam asking Rembrandt for a philosopher. He did not specify which one and left the choice to the artist, and Rembrandt chose Aristotle.
The philosopher is shown at three-quarter length in a white shirt with wide sleeves and a black cloak. He has laid his right hand on a marble bust of Homer standing on the table in front of him, his fingers resting on the sculpture's hair the way a hand is laid on a living head. Rembrandt painted the living hand and the stone differently. The skin is warm and soft, creased at the knuckle, while the marble stays smooth, even and cold. By Aristotle's lifetime, Homer already belonged to a past about as remote to him as Aristotle is to us.
A heavy gold chain hangs on the philosopher's chest with a medallion showing the profile of Alexander the Great. Aristotle was Alexander's tutor, and according to ancient tradition it was the pupil who gave him a chain of this kind. Rulers in Rembrandt's own day granted chains like it to painters as a mark of favor, and Rembrandt painted himself wearing one more than once, though whether he was ever given one is unknown.
What Aristotle is doing in this painting nobody knows. Some scholars think he is weighing the fame of a poet still read a thousand years later against the fame of a conqueror whose empire fell apart the moment he died. Others take him to be thinking about his own choice, about whether tutoring a Macedonian prince had been worth the time away from philosophy. Others again see Rembrandt's own thoughts here, a man deep in debt by 1652 who would have his possessions auctioned off a few years later. None of the readings can be proved.
Ruffo paid 500 guilders for the painting. That was eight times what Italian painters charged for a canvas of the same size, and his letters to his agent in Amsterdam complain about the price. He went on to order two more paintings from Rembrandt and spent his life buying up the prints, ending with about two hundred of them.
The painting then went through a dozen owners and ended up in England, where by the 18th century Aristotle had been forgotten. The man with the bust was called the poet Tasso, or Virgil, or an unnamed scholar, and the correct identification was restored only in the 20th century when the Ruffo family archive and its correspondence were published.
In November 1961 the Met bought it at auction in New York for 2.3 million dollars. The bidding took about four minutes, the room gave a standing ovation, and the next morning the price made the front pages, since no painting had ever sold for more at a public sale.
9. Johannes Vermeer. Young Woman with a Water Pitcher
About 35 paintings by Vermeer exist in the world and five of them are at the Met. No other museum anywhere has as many.
Young Woman with a Water Pitcher was painted around 1662. A woman in a white cap stands at a table, one hand on a silver pitcher, the other pushing open the window, and the light coming through it crosses the room, settles on white cloth, bounces off the metal and lifts her face from below. A blue tablecloth with a carpet-like pattern lies on the table, and a map hangs on the wall.
What she is doing is impossible to tell, which is usual with Vermeer. She may be about to water flowers, or opening the window, or she may have stopped halfway through a movement and started thinking. His figures are always caught in the middle of something.
For two hundred years after his death Vermeer was close to forgotten. He died in Delft in 1675 leaving a widow, eleven children and debts, he worked slowly and sold little, and his paintings scattered into private houses under other painters' names. The French critic Théophile Thoré brought him back, publishing articles in 1866 that gathered the scattered works under one name.
Twenty-three years after that publication the New York banker Henry Marquand bought Young Woman with a Water Pitcher for 800 dollars and gave it to the Met. It was the first Vermeer to enter an American collection.
10. Ogata Kōrin. Irises at Yatsuhashi
Two screens, six panels each, are covered entirely in gold leaf. Blue irises and a wooden plank bridge are painted across the gold on the diagonal. Nothing else is there, no water, no bank, no people, no sky.
The subject comes from the Tales of Ise, a collection of short stories with poems that people in Japan knew by heart for centuries. Its hero, a nobleman, leaves the capital with two friends, all three of them having decided there was nothing left for them in Kyoto, and they set off east to find somewhere to live. On the road they reached a place called Yatsuhashi, which means Eight Bridges. The river there split into eight channels with a plank bridge over each, and irises grew thickly along the banks. The travellers sat down in the shade to eat, and one of the friends proposed that the hero compose a poem about the sadness of the journey, with the additional condition that the first syllables of the five lines of the tanka spell out kakitsubata, the word for iris. He composed it, and the poem turned out to be about the wife he had left in the capital. All three of them wept, since each had left one behind in Kyoto, and their tears fell on the dried rice they were eating and made it swell.
Kōrin removed the hero from this scene, along with the friends, the horses, the river and the eight channels. The irises and the bridge were enough for an 18th-century Japanese viewer to recognize the episode, much as a balcony and a ladder are enough for a reader of Shakespeare to know that this is Romeo and Juliet.
The flowers come in dense groups, then thin out, and bare gold opens between them. The bridge breaks off at a fold and reappears at a different angle, because the screens did not stand flat. They were set up in a zigzag, and the painted line bent along with the wood. Light from the paper lanterns and the candles bounced off the gold, and in a room without windows the irises were lit from below.
Kōrin came from a family of Kyoto silk merchants who supplied the court, grew up among expensive things and ran out of money in his forties when the family business failed. He took up painting seriously at that point, out of necessity, and made the Irises around 1705, by then working on commission. The screens stood for several centuries in the Buddhist temple of Nishi-Honganji in Kyoto, and the Met bought them in 1953.
11. Emanuel Leutze. Washington Crossing the Delaware
The most famous painting in American history was made in Germany, and the first version of it burned.
Emanuel Leutze was born in Swabia, went to Philadelphia with his family as a child, trained as a painter and returned to Europe to work in Düsseldorf. He began the picture in 1849, hoping that a scene from the American revolution would push the Germans toward one of their own. A fire broke out in the studio in 1850 and badly damaged the canvas, Leutze repaired it, and the painting stayed in Bremen until a British air raid destroyed it in 1942. The second version, painted in 1851, he shipped to New York.
Success came at once. More than fifty thousand people came to see it within weeks, engravings after it spread across the country, and they still hang in American schools.
The scene is the night of 26 December 1776, when Washington took his army across the Delaware and destroyed the Hessian garrison at Trenton at dawn. Washington stands upright in the boat looking ahead, a soldier beside him holds the flag, and ice floes drift around them.
Very little of the scene is accurate. The stars-and-stripes flag was adopted after the crossing took place. The ice on the Delaware looks nothing like this, since Leutze painted it from the Rhine. Boats of this type were not used for the crossing, and nobody would have stood upright in an overloaded boat in the middle of drifting ice. The light in the painting is morning light, though the army crossed at night.
The rowers, however, were chosen deliberately. Among them are a man in a Scottish bonnet, a Black sailor, a woman in men's clothing and a farmer from the western settlements, so that Leutze put into a single boat a cross-section of the people who made up the Continental Army.
The painting was given to the Met in 1897. It takes up a wall of its own, standing more than three meters high and five meters wide.
12. Édouard Manet. Boating
In 1873 Louisine Elder, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a New York sugar refiner, came to Paris with her mother and met Mary Cassatt, an American painter who lived in France, exhibited with the Impressionists and knew all of them personally. Cassatt advised the girl to buy a pastel by Degas, and Louisine spent almost all her pocket money on it, becoming the first American to own one.
Louisine went on to marry Henry Havemeyer, who ran a sugar empire, and spent thirty years buying pictures on Cassatt's advice. Cassatt took her around the studios and wrote to her about what was worth buying. That is how the Havemeyers ended up with Courbet, Cézanne, Monet, Degas and several works by Manet, Boating among them. Cassatt's verdict on it was shorter than usual, that it was the last word in painting.
A man in a white shirt and a straw hat sits at the tiller of a sailing boat, leaning back with the sheet in his hand. A woman in a summer dress and veil sits beside him, looking away. The boat is cut off by the edges of the canvas at the top and the bottom, there is no shore and no horizon, and behind the figures a flat expanse of blue-green water rises to the top of the picture. The white sail runs diagonally across the whole canvas.
Manet painted this in the summer of 1874 at Argenteuil outside Paris, a popular boating spot, where he had come to join Monet, who was living there. The two of them worked side by side that summer, and Monet painted from the water itself, having fitted out a studio in a boat.
Louisine died in 1929 and left the Met nearly two thousand works, among them paintings, Japanese prints, glass and Asian bronzes. It is one of the largest gifts in the museum's history, and half of what hangs in the French galleries today came out of the Havemeyer house on Fifth Avenue.
13. Edgar Degas. The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer
Degas modeled her in wax, dressed her in a real cloth tutu, put cloth slippers on her feet and fixed a wig of real hair to her head with a silk ribbon in it. He then coated the hair in wax to hold it in place and showed the figure inside a glass case, the way stuffed animals are shown in natural history museums.
The model was Marie van Goethem, the daughter of a Belgian laundress and a tailor and a pupil at the ballet school of the Paris Opera. Girls like her started training at eight or nine, earned almost nothing, and their families hoped they would either make it as dancers or find a protector among the men who frequented the Opera. Marie was eventually thrown out of the school for missing classes, and what became of her afterwards is unknown.
At the Impressionist exhibition of 1881 the public was scandalized. Critics wrote that the girl was ugly, that she had the face of a criminal and the manners of a monkey, that a figure like this belonged in a medical museum and had no place in an art exhibition. Part of this came from the fashionable theories of the day, which held that criminal tendencies could be read in the shape of a skull, and part from the technique, since a sculpture was supposed to be marble or bronze, and this one wore clothes.
Degas never exhibited a sculpture publicly again in the thirty-six years he had left. The wax figure stayed in his studio, where it was found after his death in 1917 along with about a hundred and fifty other wax pieces that almost nobody had known about.
His heirs had bronzes cast, around twenty-eight of them. The original wax is in Washington today, and what stands at the Met is one of the bronzes, with a real fabric tutu and a real ribbon in the hair, as Degas wanted.
14. John Singer Sargent. Madame X
At the Paris Salon of 1884 Sargent showed a portrait of a society woman in a black dress with the right shoulder strap slipped down and lying on her arm, and the strap caused a scandal. To contemporary eyes this suggested a woman who had just been undressed or was about to be, and the room reacted accordingly. The sitter's mother turned up at the studio demanding the picture be withdrawn from the exhibition. Sargent refused, then repainted the strap back into place once the Salon closed, and that is how it has stayed.
The sitter is Virginie Gautreau, an American from Louisiana who married a French banker and became a celebrity in Paris on the strength of her looks and her skill at presenting herself. She powdered her skin with a lavender-tinted powder that made her look unnaturally pale and dyed her hair red, and Sargent painted all of it exactly as it was, powder included.
There was no commission. Sargent persuaded Gautreau to sit for him because he expected the portrait to make his name. The work took over a year, the sitter kept disappearing to parties, and they went through more than twenty poses.
After the Salon, Sargent left Paris for London and effectively ended his French career. He kept the portrait and had it in his studio for thirty-two years.
In 1916, a year after Gautreau's death, he sold it to the Met and asked that the sitter not be named in the label, which is how she stayed Madame X. In his letter to the museum Sargent wrote that it was the best thing he had ever done.
15. Mangaaka
About 380 nails, blades, hooks, plates and wedges are driven into the wooden body. In places there is so much iron that the wood underneath is invisible.
Each piece of iron records a case that someone brought. The figure was carved in the Congo region, near the Chiloango river, between 1880 and 1900, and the carver's work was only the start of it. The finished body went to an nganga, a ritual specialist who packed the cavities with the substances that made the figure work. People then came to it to make an agreement, swear an oath, accuse a neighbor or demand repayment of a debt, and hammered a nail or a blade into the wood to seal the matter.
There is no way of knowing which case corresponds to which nail. The names of the parties and the circumstances of their disputes were never written down, so all that remains of those agreements and accusations is the iron itself.
By the end of the 19th century the lower Congo had been integrated into Atlantic trade, which is why factory-made nails, screws and European furniture fittings turn up among the pieces, used alongside locally forged iron.
The word fetish, which Europeans came to apply to figures like this, came from Portuguese traders on the West African coast and meant an amulet or a piece of witchcraft. The idea that such objects were worshipped came with the word, though villagers came to Mangaaka to settle disputes and conclude agreements. Over the same decades missionaries were collecting and burning these figures as pagan idols, and some of those that survived reached European collections through the missionaries' own hands.
How Mangaaka left Africa is unknown. Its history can be traced from the point at which it was already in a private European collection, and the Met bought it in 2008. By then the beard and part of the clothing had come away, and the cavity in the belly where the nganga packed the substances was empty.
What else to see
These fifteen works are one possible selection out of many. The museum holds about two million objects, there is a great deal more that is worth the time, and how much you see depends on your schedule and your taste.
If time allows, go and see the other four Vermeers, the works by Caravaggio and Titian in the Italian galleries, and the Van Goghs, since the Met has his Cypresses, his Wheat Field with Cypresses and the self-portrait in a straw hat. The American Wing displays Tiffany windows and lamps along with a glass-roofed court containing a bank facade by Louis Sullivan. The arms and armor gallery has mounted knights in full plate, Japanese samurai armor and ceremonial weapons from around the world. In the Egyptian collection, besides Dendur, there is the tomb of the official Perneb, brought over from Saqqara in its entirety.
The museum also has a second site, the Cloisters, in a park above the Hudson at the northern end of Manhattan, roughly an hour from the main building. It was assembled in the 1930s out of genuine medieval structures, French monastic cloisters, portals and chapels bought up in France by the American sculptor George Grey Barnard. The Met acquired his collection in 1925, and John D. Rockefeller Jr paid for the building and bought land on the opposite bank of the Hudson as well, so that no development would be visible from the windows.
The Mérode Altarpiece is there, a small domestic triptych from the early 15th century that its owner kept on a table and opened when he wanted to pray. Inside it the Annunciation takes place in an ordinary room of the period, with Mary sitting on the floor reading, a towel hanging on the wall and a candle on the table that has just gone out, while on the right-hand wing Joseph sits in his workshop making mousetraps, in reference to the old theological image of the Lord's cross as a trap for the devil. Seven tapestries of the hunt of the unicorn, woven around 1500, hang in the same building.
