Making

Objects

Speak

This tour introduces students to Renaissance objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stressing how artists and their patrons not only revived ancient traditions but also adapted what they revived to the ideals and values of their own time. In the Gubbio Studiolo, the feudal lord and mercenary captain Federico da Montefeltro fills his private [...]

The Global Appetite tour of the European Decorative Arts and the European Painting collections of the Metropolitan Museum emphasizes the historical importance of food in world history as both a catalyst and consequence of larger trends and events. The audio tour focuses on the ages of exploration and empire, when Europeans diversified their larders just as they enriched their treasuries, and invites students to trace the history of European expansion in the paintings, tankards, finger bowls, and chocolate pots they examine.

In the tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, students will examine African artifacts from the seventeenth to the twentieth century to explore, from an African perspective, the often surprising nature of the encounter and developing relations between West Africans and the Portuguese, Dutch, British traders and missionaries active in the region before the rise [...]

This audio tour through some of the Ancient Roman Art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum emphasizes the imagery used by Augustus Caesar to consolidate his control over the new Roman Empire. So it works well with the political aspect of Virgil’s Aeneid: Aeneas’ destiny is to found Rome, and in Book 6 of the poem, [...]

This audio tour through the Ancient Greek Art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum is keyed to study of The Iliad. By focusing on objects embodying or displaying ancient Greek values and cultural practices, the tour helps students better understand Homer’s poem. For example, elaborate funeral monuments show the Greek desire to honor the dead (Iliad [...]

This audio tour through the Ancient Greek Art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum is keyed to study of The Odyssey. By focusing on objects embodying or displaying ancient Greek values and cultural practices, the tour helps students better understand Homer’s poem. For example, vase paintings of women getting married or weaving correlate with depictions of [...]