European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
More than 50,000 objects representing European sculpture, furniture, metalwork, glass, ceramics, and textiles from the early medieval period through the early twentieth century.
The art that was also furniture — and was meant to put you in your place.
rom the medieval period to the eve of modernism, European elites poured staggering resources into the things that filled their rooms: marble gods for the garden, porcelain for the table, clocks and cabinets and tapestries worth more than houses. These weren't decoration. They were how one aristocrat told another, without a word, exactly where they stood.
A Bernini-era marble, a shelf of Meissen, a Sèvres service painted for a king — each is a small theater of wealth, made to be lived among rather than admired from behind a rope. Read the room the way its owners did: every object a claim, the whole ensemble an argument about status everyone present already knew how to read.
