Tag: Metropolitan Museum

Met Museum Publications

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

The incipit of a Met Museum press release:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art today launched MetPublications, a major online resource that offers unparalleled in-depth access to the Museum’s renowned print and online publications, covering art, art history, archaeology, conservation, and collecting. Beginning with nearly 650 titles published from 1964 to the present, this new addition to the Met’s website, www.metmuseum.org/metpublications, will continue to expand and could eventually offer access to nearly all books, Bulletins, and Journals published by the Metropolitan Museum since its founding in 1870, as well as online publications.

Readers may also locate works of art from the Met’s collections that are included within MetPublications and access the most recent information about these works in the Collections section of the Museum’s website. […]

As might be hoped for/expected, there is a pile of stuff there, sorted into various categories, but not all of it is full text online. The search facility on the page seems to be having some growing pains as well. Fortunately, Charles Jones has culled most (if not all) of the full-text-online publications relating to antiquity (not just Greece and Rome):

… and here are the highlights which are in the purview of rogueclassicism; most of these can be read online if not downloaded as a pdf:

Colin Nouailher’s Alexander and Julius Caesar

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

I’m always interested in seeing how folks in different eras portrayed the big names of the folks within our purview and, as it happens, the Metropolitan Museum’s ‘Featured Artwork of the Day’ (via Facebook) is Colin Nouailher’s plaque of Alexander the Great, which forms part of a series of depictions of the ‘Nine Worthies’ a.k.a. ‘Nine Heroes’ which were popular ‘at court’  in sixteenth century France (due to Jacques de Longuyon’s Les Voeux du Paon). In any event, check this depiction out:

from the Metropolitan Museum

… the official description page with further details can be found here but it is interesting how — to a Classicist — ‘unAlexander-like’ this depiction is, not least because of the beard. One could make a similar comment about another plaque in the series depicting Julius Caesar:

via the Metropolitan Museum

… more info here. Both look more like oriental potentates than anything else, which probably reflects on the French court’s ideas of ‘power’ at the time (that’s me drawing conclusions rather quickly). The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History does have an interesting article on this sort of thing: Images of Antiquity in Limoges Enamels in the French Renaissance.
Outside of that, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France has a very nice manuscript of Les Voeux du Paon online, although it isn’t illustrated. The Bodleian has some pages of illustrations  from the same work (I think), but they are kind of grotty. I’m sure there are better ones out there …