You'd think it's just a museum...Ok, so it's called The Metropolitan Museum of Art, so the building looks really big and impressive, but when you go inside, you feel as if you've entered a labyrinth of history where you can just cruise through time. I didn't get a change to see all the collections as the museum is not open 24 hours, but I got to see the Egyptian Art & Medieval History, the Arms and Armors collection and The Age of Rembrandt.
I saw a mummy for the first time and what I found amazing was that it was so easy to not think about the person that was in there when you had no representation of that person. But some o them had their face painted over the wrappings and suddenly it was not so easy to view the mummy as a piece of history; I realized that somehow I was in a graveyard where the bodies were not buried, but displayed for everybody to see.
The arms and armors seemed huge, especially the ones that were used in the 15th or 16th century. Horses and men dresses in steel with huge guns or swords. It seemed that they were able to carry more than their bodyweight and still fight. And the armor seemed so stiff and tight - I guess they didn't suffer from claustrophobia :).
The Age of Rembrandt was the part I liked most. Maybe because I love Rembrandt or maybe because it was so incredible. There were paintings by Rembrandt, but also by his apprentices and by other painters that were inspired by him. It's impossible not to love his portraits and self portraits. I had the feeling that some of them were not even painted, but that he somehow photographed the persons and than he painted over the photographs. Details, that you could barely acknowledge were spread across huge canvas, were drawing you closer to the subject as you could ever be. I remembered something I read for the Media Theory class about the "aura" that art has and how that "aura" is disappearing more and more in new art. The "aura" was still there in Rembrandt's paintings and it took over your feelings the moment you started looking at the canvas. You were transported in a new dimension, a dimension of color, shades, darkness and light where all the characters are still but talk to you in different languages, where the lines all converge in your life-line, and where the "aura" still exists.
I saw a mummy for the first time and what I found amazing was that it was so easy to not think about the person that was in there when you had no representation of that person. But some o them had their face painted over the wrappings and suddenly it was not so easy to view the mummy as a piece of history; I realized that somehow I was in a graveyard where the bodies were not buried, but displayed for everybody to see.
The arms and armors seemed huge, especially the ones that were used in the 15th or 16th century. Horses and men dresses in steel with huge guns or swords. It seemed that they were able to carry more than their bodyweight and still fight. And the armor seemed so stiff and tight - I guess they didn't suffer from claustrophobia :).
The Age of Rembrandt was the part I liked most. Maybe because I love Rembrandt or maybe because it was so incredible. There were paintings by Rembrandt, but also by his apprentices and by other painters that were inspired by him. It's impossible not to love his portraits and self portraits. I had the feeling that some of them were not even painted, but that he somehow photographed the persons and than he painted over the photographs. Details, that you could barely acknowledge were spread across huge canvas, were drawing you closer to the subject as you could ever be. I remembered something I read for the Media Theory class about the "aura" that art has and how that "aura" is disappearing more and more in new art. The "aura" was still there in Rembrandt's paintings and it took over your feelings the moment you started looking at the canvas. You were transported in a new dimension, a dimension of color, shades, darkness and light where all the characters are still but talk to you in different languages, where the lines all converge in your life-line, and where the "aura" still exists.
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