Stand back to see all of this huge painting. Can you make out the setting? At the top, look for a tangle of tree limbs, and birds flying into the cloudy, sunset sky. What season of the year do you think it is? From the look of these bare branches, it's mid-winter. Darkness cloaks the forest below. But can you see traces of color from the sunset reflected here, in the shadows? After the sun sets, the forest will be freezing cold. Are there any people still making their way home? The French artist Théodore Rousseau worked on this painting off and on for twenty years. It shows the ancient forest of Fontainebleau, near the village of Barbizon. Rousseau belonged to a group of artists called the Barbizon School. They often painted outdoors, looking at the forests and fields they were painting. Rousseau came to know the forest of Fontainebleau so well he painted this indoors, from memory.

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This triptych is in astonishing condition. As part of our "investigations" tour, we join conservator Michael Gallagher and curator Maryan Ainsworth.

Michael Gallagher: It's nice to be able to stand in front of a painting and not talk about problems or changes that diminish anything. The Penitence of Saint Jerome is really just a painting to drop your jaw and enjoy. It's extraordinary.

Maryan Ainsworth: They're in such marvelous condition, the three interior panels. And even the exterior ones.

Michael Gallagher: It's really phenomenal. One of the things that's worth noting is the way . . . the transition from the naturalistic green tones as it drops back very, very gradually to the bluish distance, the sort of aerial perspective the artist has created. It's completely intact. Often, these greens, these copper-based greens, get very dark. They probably are somewhat darker than they were when the painting was first executed. But they retain their green hue. It's just seamless, that dropping further and further back.

Maryan Ainsworth: It achieves what Patinir really was after, and that is this miraculous recession into space, into the far depths, back to the mountains. What do you think accounts for the fact that this has survived so well and particularly the tones in the landscape, which so often change over time?

Michael Gallagher: The short answer to that is I don't know. The reason is it's history—a history we can only know a part of. But it's clearly being displayed in a way, stored in a way that has prevented the painting being subjected to excessive amounts of light. It hasn't been harshly cleaned numerous times. It's a luck of history. But, you know, we should really celebrate something that is in such extraordinary condition. You just want to stand in front of it and lose yourself in the landscape.

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It is the mark of a great artist that he could draw such life from so compact a block of stone. Senwosret III, one of the great rulers of Egypt's Twelfth Dynasty who conquered Nubia to the South and made it a province of Egypt, is portrayed here as a magnificent sphinx. His brooding, weary expression, combined with a majestic lion's body, creates a disturbing impression. Senwosret the man is represented with consummate skill, at a particular moment in time. The cares of a long and difficult life are visible on his face, in his furrowed brow and grimly disdainful mouth. His expression speaks of his role as protector of his people, and the burden of his responsibilities.

If you spend some time studying the portraits of rulers in these galleries, you may learn to discern their identities. The heads of the figures are so individualized that they are almost instantly recognizable. But of all the portraits of Middle Kingdom rulers in this Museum, this one alone bears its subject's name. Egyptian rulers of this period had five official names. On Senworset's leonine chest, for example, you can see an inscription that combines two of these.

Now, I've just given you some interesting information. What is really important, though, what you should take away from the contemplation of this sublime sculpture is the sense—and for me, it's magical—of peering through four millennia of history, deep into the eyes of one of earth's greatest rulers, as transmitted to us by a truly great artist, albeit anonymous.

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Welcome to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to its Great Hall, one of the most magnificent interior public spaces in New York City. I'm Morrison Heckscher, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Chairman of the American Wing, and I'll be your guide for the special audio tour we've created about the Museum's architecture. Find a comfortable place to stand while I tell you a bit about the history of this remarkable building.

The Metropolitan Museum is itself a work of art. But it's a work of art that has been in more or less constant evolution since its doors first opened in 1880. Fortunately, the Museum has preserved its past and kept vestiges of its many iterations. Taken together, these elements illustrate the history of America's most important nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectural styles.

Of the many architects who have worked on this building, Richard Morris Hunt was among the most prominent. Hunt was the first American architect to study at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His legacy at the Metropolitan can be seen in the Museum's stately façade, the Grand Staircase leading up to the second floor, and the vast, ceremonial space of the Great Hall, in which you are now standing. The Metropolitan demonstrates Hunt's mastery of the Beaux-Arts style, an architecture particularly suited to civic buildings at the end of the nineteenth century. Named after the school in Paris, the style is distinguished by its unified treatment of interior and exterior spaces and by its references to traditional, classical forms. In the Great Hall, many details are classically inspired. For example, the four pedimented niches overflowing with flowers—which originally were intended to display classical sculpture; the elegant colonnades, or rows of columns, which lead to the Museum's galleries; and the domes, which correspond to the three massive arched windows that define the Museum's façade. If you'd like to hear more about Richard Morris Hunt—one of America's first internationally renowned architects—press the green play button now.

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The Cloisters derives its name from the elements of five medieval cloisters that have been integrated into the design of the Museum. Three of these have been reconstituted as complete, four-sided cloisters. Of these, this one, from the monastery of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, is the best known. The abbey of Cuxa was founded in 878 in the eastern Pyrenees by Benedictine monks from a nearby monastery that was destroyed by an avalanche. The new monastery was dedicated to Saint Michael, the warrior archangel.

The Cuxa cloister was built in the twelfth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, George Grey Barnard acquired approximately half of the dispersed capitals for his collection, which forms the core of The Cloisters today. This dictated that the dimensions of the Cuxa cloister be smaller than the original cloister at Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa—the original was four times the size you see here. The sequence in which the capitals are presented here is hypothetical.

The columns and capitals are all carved from the pink-veined marble taken from quarries near Cuxa. When the Museum was ready to install the Cuxa cloister, these quarries were reopened, so that the same pink marble could be used to make the new architectural elements as in the original twelfth-century elements. Some of the capitals are carved with designs evoking palmettes, vine scrolls, pine cones, or acanthus leaves. Figurative capitals show lions rearing and gnashing their teeth or devouring humans, ribald apes and mermaids, men grasping eagles or blowing horns, and several varieties of infernal beasts.

In 1125 Bernard, abbot of the new Cistercian monastery at Clairveaux, ridiculed the excesses of architectural detail similar to the ones you see here in the Cuxa cloister. To hear an excerpt of this diatribe, please press the green play button now.

Learn more about The Cloisters Museum and Gardens.

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