With the
reopening of the Metropolitan’s Greek and Roman galleries,
the Great Hall of this museum has become a compelling visual metaphor for the
Mediterranean.[1]
Entering Richard Morris Hunt’s grandiloquent space is now
not only a progress into the museum, but an
introduction to the geographical center of where the art and
culture of the West began: turn right and you are in
dynastic Egypt; straight ahead and Byzantium transforms
itself into early medieval Europe; and on the
left, mysterious little Neolithic and Cycladic figurines
herald the start of it all—there in the eastern
Mediterranean.

Hunt
was a decidedly better stylist when working with the Gothic
and even Baroque vocabularies than that of the Classical age. The
Met’s Great Hall of 1902, with its huge, oppressive arches sitting on
their stubby pilasters, gives the impression of having somehow
sunk deep into the ground. Manipulating the
same style, Charles Follen McKim had a much surer hand: those New
Yorkers fortunate to remember the old Pennsylvania station will
know about truly imperial proportions. That same, deft
sensibility was engaged by McKim when he was called by the museum
to plan the extensions that were grafted onto Hunt’s central hub
in 1911. The museum’s Greek and Roman holdings have been housed
in the southern wing of that expansion ever since.

Occupying a substantial proportion of the building’s
footprint, the Classical galleries are essentially divided into two
main sections: a long, axial corridor with lateral
rooms leading to a large