Metropolitan Museum of Art
European paintings, Egyptian temples, Islamic ceramics, American period rooms, and arms and armor spanning five thousand years of world culture.
Five thousand years of human culture gathered under a single roof.
ounded in 1870 without a royal collection, ancestral hoard, or government endowment, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was assembled through private patronage, archaeological excavation, and civic ambition. The resulting holdings span five millennia of visual culture across seventeen curatorial departments.
The museum’s encyclopedic structure allows visitors to move directly between disparate material worlds: an intact Egyptian tomb, a 17th-century Dutch interior, a courtly Mughal manuscript, and modern abstraction. The collection functions as a comparative study of how societies across time and geography have solved the problems of craft, faith, and form.
Highlights
Themes
Collections
Main Collection
Ancient Near Eastern Art
Arms and Armor
Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
Asian Art
Drawings and Prints
Egyptian Art
European Paintings
European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
Greek and Roman Art
Islamic Art
Medieval Art
Modern and Contemporary Art
Musical Instruments
Photographs
Robert Lehman Collection
The American Wing
The Cloisters
The Costume Institute
