MET Visit

My experience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was different from the Brooklyn Museum. Just by walking up to the large building was an eye-opener. The inside was widely spaced and was very busy indicating it is a popular museum. The Museum is split up based on Geographically designated collections which I thought was easier to look at the art. When looking at the art on display you can see that Renaissance and the Baroque are vastly different. Although from the two painting I choose to use look identical for a few reasons: women are the main focus of the painting and it looks like a common domestic scene. If you look closely you can spot the differences. For starters, if you look at the painting of “Woman with a Water Jug” by Johannes Vermeer you see the subtlety of the light coming from the window on her headdress and under her arm which is one characteristic of Baroque art. Another characteristic is that the painting is “unstable,” it is a specific moment in time. The lady is picking up a pitcher, putting it down, and opening a window. She is caught in between the two movements. Also notice how she is ruining the balance and stability of the environment because everything is rectangular: the window, the map behind her, and the table and she is in between all of these objects. Now when looking at a renaissance painting, “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt” by a follower of Massys is more stable and looks serene. There are horizontal and verticals like the tree and the baby which are straight unlike the squares. The painting looks calm. It does not look like a transition or a specific moment of time. So even though at first glance these paintings seem similar they are actually from different time periods and areas and are seen to be vastly different based on that.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.