Interesting and Fun Facts about the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest art museum in the US

Search engine giant Google celebrates the 151st Anniversary of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (simply known as Met), located in New York City is the largest art museum in the United States (US), with an animated Doodle on April 13, 2021. It is among the most visited art museums in the world.

Google Doodle denotes The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 151st anniversary with a carousel of selected pieces from the museum’s collection. Google is participating in the party with an animated Doodle including 18 pieces of art from the museum’s vast collection.

50 Interesting and Fun Facts about the Metropolitan Museum of Art

1. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or basically the Met, is one of the greatest and best art museums in the whole world. It’s a quintessential piece of New York iconography and has seen a bigger number of guests than almost some other art museum in the world.

2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is an art museum. It is sometimes called The Met. It is found on the eastern edge of Central Park in New York City. It has a collection of more than two million works of art.

3. The main building is one of the world’s biggest art galleries, at around 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2) in area. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the most popular art museum in the United States with more than 5 million guests every year.

4. There is additionally a lot more modest second location, The Cloisters. The Cloisters museum and gardens, which opened to the public in 1938, is a branch of the Museum. It is situated in Inwood, in northern Manhattan.

5. It has medieval art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which includes its Main Building for Fifth Avenue and the Cloisters in northern Manhattan, dates back to 1866.

6. In 1866, a group of Americans in Paris, France, consented to make a “national institution and gallery of art”. Their objective was to bring art and art education to the American people.

7. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was established in 1870. The originators included businessmen and financiers, as well as leading artists and scholars of the day, who wanted to open a museum to carry art and art education to the American public. It opened on February 20, 1872, and was initially situated at 681 Fifth Avenue.

8. The Met was established in 1870 by a group of businessmen, financiers, artists, and cultural enthusiasts. Today, it’s known for its stylish digs on Museum Mile, a swath of Fifth Avenue that borders Central Park, yet the institution was initially situated in a lot more modest building at 681 Fifth Avenue, which housed a Roman stone sarcophagus and 174 European paintings.

9. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection immediately became excessively huge for space, and in 1873, the museum was moved to an estate on West 14th Street known as the Douglas Mansion, where it stayed until builders finished its permanent location in 1879.

10. The museum has art from traditional relics and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from European artists, and an enormous collection of American and modern art.

11. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was established on April 13, 1870. The founders included businessmen and financiers, as well as leading artists and scholars of the day.

12. Since the Museum opened its doors to the public in its current location in Central Park in 1880, its footprint has extended to cover more than 2,000,000 square feet (185,000 square meters).

13. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened the Met Breuer museum at Madison Avenue in the Upper East Side; it broadens the museum’s modern and contemporary art program.

14. The Met Fifth Avenue is one of the world’s biggest art galleries and presents more than 5,000 years of art spanning all societies and time periods.

15. It houses more than 2 million pieces of art in its permanent collection, split between seventeen curatorial departments.

16. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection is curated by seventeen separate departments, each with a specific staff of caretakers and researchers, as well as six dedicated conservation departments and a Department of Scientific Research.

17. The permanent collection comprises works of art from classical artifacts and old Egypt, works of art and sculptures from virtually all the European masters, and a broad collection of American and modern art.

18. The Met keeps up extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is additionally home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and classical weapons and armor around the world.

19. The old Egyptian hippopotamus statuette that is presently the Museum’s unofficial mascot, “William,” entered the collection in 1917.

20. The oldest items at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a bunch of Archeulian flints from Deir el-Bahri which date from the Lower Paleolithic period (somewhere in the range of 300,000 and 90,000 BC), are part of the Egyptian collection.

Read More: Metropolitan Museum of Art: Google Animated Doodle Celebrates the 151st Anniversary of the Met

21. The oldest work is an Iranian storage jar dating back to 3800 to 3700 B.C. In the fourth millennium B.C. in central and southwestern Iran, painted decoration on pottery like this huge jar arrived at a new level of sophistication.

22. Various notable interiors, going from first-century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met’s galleries.

23. The Met’s collection of musical instruments contain the oldest piano in existence, and one of only three that get by from the workshop of the inventor of the piano, Bartolomeo Cristofori. The antique instrument dates back to 1720.

24. The museum’s longest work is a sixteenth-century Egyptian carpet named the “Simonetti” carpet after a previous proprietor, this superb weaving is among the most famous of all Mamluk carpets. The carpet is 8.97 x 2.39 meters (353 x 94 inches)

25. The smallest work is a 2.8-centimeter (1.1-inch) cylinder from old Mesopotamia that was used to stamp impressions on clay.

26. The museum’s first accessioned object was a Roman sarcophagus, at present on display in the collection of Greek and Roman art.

27. The Met’s collection of European paintings numbers around 1,700 pieces. This collection incorporates representative works from such masters as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Raphael, El Greco, Goya, Gauguin, Monet, and Van Gogh.

28. The European Sculpture and Decorative Arts collection is one of the largest departments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, holding more than 50,000 separate pieces from the fifteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Even though the collection is especially concentrated in Renaissance sculpture, it likewise contains comprehensive holdings of furniture, jewelry, glass and ceramic pieces, tapestries, textiles, and timepieces, and mathematical instruments.

29. The Met’s Department of Arms and Armor is one of the museum’s most famous collections. The collection involves around 14,000 objects, of which more than 5,000 are European, 2,000 are from the Near East, and 4,000 from the Far East. It is one of the most comprehensive and encyclopedic collections of its sort.

30. The Met’s Department of Arms and Armor is one of the museum’s most popular collections. The distinctive “parade” of armored figures on horseback installed in the first-floor Arms and Armor gallery is one of the most conspicuous pictures of the museum, which was coordinated in 1975 with the assistance of the Russian immigrant and arms and armors’ researcher, Leonid Tarassuk (1925–90).

31. Since the time its foundation in 1870 the Museum has obtained significant examples of American Art. A different “American Wing” working to display the domestic arts of the 17th–early 19th centuries opened in 1924; paintings exhibitions and an enclosed sculpture court were included in 1980.

32. Starting in the late nineteenth century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art began to obtain old art and antiques from the Near East. From a few cuneiform tablets and seals, the Met’s collection of Near Eastern art has developed to more than 7,000 pieces.

33. Even though the Met initially procured a group of Peruvian antiquities in 1882, the museum didn’t start a concerted effort to gather works from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas until 1969, when American businessman and philanthropist Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum.

34. Today, the Met’s collection contains more than 11,000 pieces from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas and is housed in the 40,000-square-foot (4,000 m2) Rockefeller Wing on the south end of the museum.

35. The Met’s Asian department holds a collection of Asian art, of more than 35,000 pieces, that is apparently the most extensive in the US. The collection dates back nearly to the establishing of the museum: a significant number of the philanthropists who made the earliest gifts to the museum included Asian art in their collections.

36. Today, a whole wing of the museum is devoted to the Asian collection and ranges 4,000 years of Asian art. Each Asian civilization is represented in the Met’s Asian department, and the pieces on display incorporate each kind of decorative art, from painting and printmaking to sculpture and metalworking.

37. The Museum of Costume Art was established by Aline Bernstein and Irene Lewisohn. In 1937, they merged with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and became its Costume Institute department. Today, its collection contains more than 35,000 costumes and accessories.

38. The Costume Institute is known for throwing the annual Met Gala and for putting on blockbuster summer shows like Savage Beauty and China: Through the Looking Glass.

39. Even though most of the Met’s initial holdings of Egyptian art came from private collections, things revealed during the museum’s own archeological excavations, completed somewhere in the range of 1906 and 1941, establish almost 50% of the current collection. Above 26,000 separate pieces of Egyptian art from the Paleolithic period through the Ptolemaic time comprise the Met’s Egyptian collection, and almost every one of them is on display in the museum’s enormous wing of 40 Egyptian galleries.

40. The Met’s collection of European paintings numbers around 1,700 pieces, some of which are appeared among the Selections from the permanent collection of paintings section.

41. The European Sculpture and Decorative Arts collection are one of the biggest departments at the Met, holding more than 50,000 separate pieces from the fifteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries.

42. The Met’s collection of Greek and Roman art contains more than 17,000 objects. The Greek and Roman collections date back to the establishing of the museum—truth be told, the museum’s first accessioned object was a Roman sarcophagus, still as of now on display.

43. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of medieval art comprises a comprehensive range of Western art from the 4th through the mid-sixteenth centuries, as well as Byzantine and pre-medieval European artifacts excluded from the Ancient Greek and Roman collection.

44. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened a new venue in the Marcel Breuer-designed building at Madison Avenue and 75th Street in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the previous Whitney Museum of American Art. It broadens the museum’s modern and contemporary art program.

45. The Thomas J. Watson Library, built-in 1964 principally for the use of the museum staff and visiting researchers, is the central library of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and supports the activities of staff and specialists. Watson Library’s collection contains about 900,000 volumes, including monographs and exhibition catalogs; more than 11,000 periodical titles; and over 125,000 auction and sale catalogs. The Library incorporates a reference collection, auction and sale catalogs, an uncommon book collection, manuscript items, and vertical file collections. The Library is open to anybody 18 years old or older basically by registering online and giving a valid photo ID.

46. The New York State Legislature allowed the Metropolitan Museum of Art an Act of Incorporation on April 13, 1870 “to establish and maintain in said City a Museum and Library of Art, of encouraging and developing the Study of the Fine Arts, and the application of Art to manufacture and natural life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and to that end of furnishing popular instruction and recreations”.

47. The museum praised its 75th anniversary (which it named Diamond Jubilee) with a collection of programs, activities, and events in 1946, culminating in the anniversary of the launch of its first exhibition on February 22, 1947. The anniversary festivities included speeches, exhibitions, cross-promotions with films and plays, and related displays in Fifth Avenue store windows.

48. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial was praised with exhibitions, symposia, concerts, lectures, the reopening of refurbished galleries, special tours, social events, and another programming for eighteen months from October 1969 through the spring of 1971. The centennial’s events (including an open house, Centennial Ball, year-long art history course for the public, and different educational programming and traveling exhibitions) and publications drew on help from prominent New Yorkers, artists, writers, composers, interior designers, and art historians.

49. There are four piles of uncarved stone atop the four columns on the front façade of The Met. These were initially intended to be sculptures yet cash ran out, and the stone piles remain today. They would have been sculptures representing the Egyptian, Greek, Renaissance, and Modern art times.

50. On April 13, 2021, Google animated Doodle marked the 151st Anniversary of The Metropolitan Museum of Art with a carousel of selected pieces from the museum’s vast collection.