Glories Of The Met

There are many outstanding examples of ancient art in the Met’s collections. We take a look at a few highlights – both from the exhibition Making the Met and elsewhere in the museum – that open a window on to the institution’s past.

This exquisite carving of an eagle eating a cactus fruit (symbolising the sun consuming a human heart) is one of a pair of reliefs acquired by the Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church in Mexico in the winter of 1892-1893. Church gave both reliefs to the Met in 1893 to improve what he described as its ‘meagre collection’ of ancient American art. He presented them as Aztec works, which he said had been unearthed by a plough near Tampico, on Mexico’s east coast, but they are in fact early Toltec reliefs, dating from the 10th-13th century AD. Church, an early trustee of the museum, was a keen advocate of the presentation of Pre-Columbian art in the galleries and supported acquisitions in this area.

The female pharaoh Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt in the 18th Dynasty, is shown seated in this splendid life-size limestone statue, in all measuring a little over 2m in height. Hatshepsut built her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri in western Thebes around 1475 BC. There, the Met’s Egyptian Expedition uncovered fragments of statues of the pharaoh, which had been deliberately destroyed after her death by her co-ruler and nephew Thutmose III. The finest – according to Herbert E Winlock, who directed the excavation – belonged to the head of the statue shown here. He wrote, ‘personally I think that it is one of the best things which we have ever found’. The head was found during the 1926-1927 season, along with the left forearm and parts of the throne, but the lower part of the statue was in Berlin’s Ägyptisches Museum. The Met exchanged fragments they had excavated of a granite sphinx, whose head was at the Ägyptisches Museum, for fragments of the body of Hatshepsut, which was then restored.