Foot and Fire

Using the same-day visit ticket at the main The Metropolitan Museum of Arts or The Met, one can head to The Cloister, a branch of The Met that houses all medieval age pieces. The art pieces transport one to Europe and cathedrals and chivalry and Dan Brown stories.  I gave out this tip in my earlier post. TIPS: On same day entrance to The Met, one can head to picturesque The Met Cloister in Fort Thryon. The bus M4 leading to it is just a block away crossing from The Met. And btw, if you're with a NY resident, you can come in as guest. The resident has to just give a donation.  And the Garden is a wonderful place to recharge after 3 hours of museum walk at tge main The Met.  The pieces are heavy but I think the unicorn room filled with unicorn paintings will transport one to a dreamy, mythical, magical world of unicorns.

I mentioned in my earlier blog that the other thing apart from French Painter Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates painting, I gushed over the Egyptian relics. Having seen a real mummy with intricate bandage, met a Sphinx and scrutinized a Mentuhotep statue in person gave me an inexplicable joy. I read somewhere that The Met or the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one Museum that you have to go to if you have to choose one, and now, I agree. The African Origin of Civilization with Egyptian Art in Gallery 136  Floor 1. But see more in Galleries 304, 376, 455, 550, 601, 681, 753, 828, 957, 964, Ground Floor, Floors 1 & 2.  The mummy that gave real face to the mummies we just saw in movies. The fabric used is sturdy and the latticework in wrapping the body is intricate, not like it's just wrapped by a roll paper.  Dutch masters were a real find too and I was lucky to have seen a Rembrandt and a Vermee

The Metropolitan Museum of Art or The Met has shown me two wonderful things when I visited it. I was able to see a real mummy, sphinx and statue of pharoah Mentuhotep and this 1787 oil painting on canvas by Jacques-Louis David.  Just before making this blog, I checked the wikipedia entry on this one to see if my own appreciation adds up to it, only to find out that I got my own understanding of the painting.  Wiki says, " The Death of Socrates (French: La Mort de Socrate) is an oil on canvas painted by French painter Jacques-Louis David in 1787. The painting was part of the neoclassical style, popular in the 1780s, that depicted subjects from the Classical age, in this case the story of the execution of Socrates as told by Plato in his Phaedo.[1] In this story, Socrates has been convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and introducing strange gods, and has been sentenced to die by drinking poison hemlock. Socrates uses his death as a final lesson for his pupils rath