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This issue of met objectives illustrates several large-scale projects, just completed or in progress, that employ the expertise of various Museum and independent professionals. It also foreshadows the future direction of this periodical, which will become a voice for conservators and scientists throughout the Museum. The technical study of a large colonial tapestry, and the painstaking treatment carried out to stabilize its structure and improve its appearance, is described by conservators in the Department of Textile Conservation and a member of the Museum's Science Group. The recent treatment and newly designed presentation of an ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom tomb called for the collaborative efforts of objects conservators, curators, designers, and engineers, as well as contracted architects and stonemasons. The final article in this issue discusses the ongoing exterior cleaning and repair of the Museum's largest work of art: the building itself.
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Future objectives
During five years of publication, met objectives, the newsletter of the Sherman Fairchild Center for Objects Conservation, has become an important means of sharing the Department's activities with conservation and curatorial professionals, as well as with the interested public. The success of the publication can be seen in the rapid growth of our readership, now totaling approximately 1150 individual and institutional subscribers in forty countries, who receive our newsletter free-of-charge through the generous support of a private donor. A similar number is reserved for visitors to the Center or distributed at conferences and symposia. Continue
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Conservation and Technical Study of a Colonial Andean Tapestry
Tapestries produced after the Spanish Conquest of Peru in 1532 form a hybrid group of artworks that spans the cultural and technical horizons of the age of exploration and discovery. The Museum is fortunate to have several in its collection, including one masterwork featuring a quintessential mixture of Andean and Spanish aesthetics and manufacturing techniques (Figure 1). As this tapestry will be featured in the upcoming exhibition "Tapestries and Silverwork from the Colonial Andes" (September 27–December 12, 2004), it is currently undergoing study and conservation.
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A New Gateway to Egypt
In 1913 the Metropolitan Museum purchased the partly ruined tomb of Perneb (ca. 2381–2323 B.C.), an official in the royal household buried at Saqqara during the late Fifth Dynasty (Figure 1). Dismantled and transported to New York, the tomb was placed in the first gallery north of the Great Hall, where it has greeted visitors to the Museum's extensive collection of Egyptian art since 1916.
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The Met Comes Clean
As visitors have already witnessed during the past year, the Metropolitan Museum has embarked on the task of cleaning and restoring its exterior (Figure 1). The four-block-long facade along Fifth Avenue, constructed directly in front of the original building by Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould (1880), was erected entirely out of Indiana limestone, but consists of four separate wings that were designed between 1902 and 1917 by the renowned firms of Richard Morris Hunt and McKim, Meade and White. Continue
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