Main Collection
Explore the full encyclopedic collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art — 5,000 years of art from across the world.
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.
