Da Vinci’s Saint Jerome
Brad Miner
My wife and I are museum rats. We spend a lot of time in museums when we travel and a lot when we stay at home – home being the New York City metro area. New York City itself is home to about seventy art museums (plus many others devoted to science and industry), and the greatest of these is the venerable MET: the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue between 80th and 84th Streets.
The MET is one of the largest museums on earth and the third most-visited (after the Louvre in Paris and Beijing’s National Museum of China) – 6,953,927 visitors last year to be exact, of which those 27 must be the Miners. Our MET membership pays wonderful dividends.
“Museum” comes from the Greek, mouseion – the seat of the Muses – and nearly every museum I’ve ever visited has been an inspiration. A great museum is a close cousin of a great cathedral, with similar echoing footfalls and hushed voices. Your eyes are pulled to every compass point, and there are occasions of awe.
The MET collection includes 2,000,000 works of art, so it would take you something like a century to see everything, although, even then, you’d probably be rushing too much through each daily visit.
From the standpoint of The Catholic Thing, the MET offers a treasure of 406,000 hi-res digital images of works in its collections – 1,700 from its holdings of European paintings – not a few of which have illustrated our columns over the last decade.
If you’ve visited, you know that, from Fifth Avenue, you walk up three tiers of granite steps to enter the museum’s Great Hall. If you go straight ahead and to the left or right of another great set of stairs, you come to the MET’s collection of medieval art. And it was here, on our most recent visit, that I was struck with the thought that there would not be an art museum on the scale of the MET (or the Louvre) were it not for the Catholic faith. The MET even has a sister museum, the Cloisters (set on a hill overlooking the Hudson River), devoted exclusively to medieval European architecture, sculpture, and decorative arts, pretty much all of it from when pretty much all of Europe was Catholic.
Click here to read the rest of Mr. Miner’s column . . .
Image: Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness, c. 1480
Image: Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness, c. 1480
American "conservatives" have been blinded by the light.
"You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in."
Arlo Guthrie
"You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in."
Arlo Guthrie
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton
Religion And Perfectionism
Religion And Perfectionism
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