Monsters at the Met: A Virtual Tour
An unofficial tour of monsters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
In case it isn’t clear from my hobby of making monthly lists of things to do around New York City, I love to organize and categorize things.
This hobby of mine is no doubt what made me so excited in 2017 when I discovered that much of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection was publicly searchable. I was fascinated by the artistic whiplash that a search term like Argentina or Shakespeare could give you.
Spotting a Monster
The artwork that made me first think about monsters is, unfortunately, neither still on display nor with photos in the public domain, but you can view the link for French artist Balthus’ 1935 portrait of Lelia Caetani. While in his twenties, the controversial artist Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, or Balthus (“bal-TOO”), painted a series of strange looking portraits. “Monster” showed up as a search result because of the last sentence in the catalog entry: “Balthus later called his stylized, unflattering, and even bizarre portraits his ‘monsters.’”
The idea of a “monster” is one of those universal things. Things have been scary and hideous in religion and storytelling for as long as those pursuits been around. Sometimes they’re human, sometimes they’re animal, and sometimes they’re impossible to describe. Of course, there are plenty of paintings with more traditional monsters in them, too. In this post, I stick to the trove of nearly a half million images available for open access.
Andromeda and the Sea Monster
The wall painting below, created around the same time as the birth of Jesus, tells the story of Perseus and Andromeda with two scenes across one fresco. At the center, Andromeda is chained to the rocks. This was a punishment for her mother, Cassiopeia, boasting that Andromeda was more beautiful than the Nereids.
Perseus is swooping in from the left, about to rescue her from the sea monster at the bottom-left. Perseus is returning to Greece after having decapitated Medusa and is planning to bring Andromeda back with him and marry her. On the right half, Andromeda’s father thanks Perseus for his heroism while Andromeda sits weary but safe on the bottom-right corner.
Wall paintings are unlike your standard oil on canvas fare. This work was excavated in the early 1900s at a site near Pompeii. It was painted directly on the wall of a villa that became buried after the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The colors may be muted, but millennia later, the monster remains terrifying. Google Arts & Culture offers a very high-resolution scan if you want to see it more closely without traveling to the museum.
Despite this scene being dug from the ashes from an ancient volcano, the story of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from a sea monster remains pervasive in art to this day. The more modern sculpture of Andromeda shown below, part of an airy, breathtaking sculpture court on The Met’s first floor, freezes a scene where Andromeda spots her rescuer just before being attacked. The grisly monster at the bottom left, with its rows of teeth and bumpy face, is especially jarring next to Andromeda’s more polished skin. Limited by the color of the marble, sculptor Domenico Guidi offers a masterclass in how texture alone can be used to contrast different elements of a scene.
Domenico Guidi was among the most prominent sculptors of Baroque-era Italy, perhaps the most prominent sculptor immediately following the death of Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1680. Around 20 years after that, John Cecil, 5th Early of Exeter (gotta love those British titles of nobility), was traveling in Italy in his last year of life and likely saw this sculpture unsold in Guidi’s workshop and bought it. Cecil then died on his way home to England, and ever since, the sculpture was wrongly attributed to Pierre-Étienne Monnot, one of Cecil’s favorites. The mistake was not caught until the 1990s—going to show that art history is an active field, and we should not always take museum placards as gospel!
Apollo and Python
The scope of The Met’s collection is vast. You will find plenty of paintings and sculptures, but you will also see artistic expression in all of its forms. Monsters can be found drawn, sculpted, painted, and portrayed in different scales and on different surfaces. The arms and armor galleries are particularly striking. There you will find things like firearms, swords, and, though not currently on view, even a sixteenth-century German crossbow with sea monsters etched onto the housing. One of the museum’s highlights is the full ceremonial armor of King Henry II, who reigned as the king of France from 1547 to 1559.
The ornately decorated surfaces signal this as parade armor, i.e., not one to be used in combat. This armor in particular is “one of the most elaborate and complete” examples at The Met. It is decorated from head to toe with depictions of many human figures and mythological stories. One monster in particular can be found on the back of the shoulders: the dragon-serpent Python, after having been slain by Apollo.
The serpent Python was said to live at the center of the Earth and was summoned by the goddess Hera to pursue the pregnant goddess Leto before she gave birth to twins. This was in retaliation for Zeus—king of the gods and Hera’s husband—having betrayed Hera with Leto. Python failed, however, and Leto gave birth to twins: Apollo and Artemis. Baby Apollo then killed Python when he was only four days old, making the armor’s image one of triumph.
Musical Monsters
Another category of art well represented in The Met’s collection is musical instruments. Specific galleries devoted to them reopened in 2019, including fascinating historical objects like the oldest known extant piano and Andrés Segovia’s principal concert guitar. The instruments span the globe, and in many cases, it is the artistry, not necessarily the history, that is on display.
One gallery, located along a thin mezzanine area overlooking the arms and armor, has an installation artfully displaying dozens of instruments called Fanfare. Note the pair of colorful rkang-gling horns near the center, an instrument that is described later in this article.
Throughout the instrument galleries, there are a few monsters lurking about, highlighting the role that music plays in the big and scary. In one case, a Hindu instrument called a śankh (pronounced “shonk”) comprises a conch shell and two elaborate brass fittings. Śankhs are usually connected to the god Vishnu and are used as trumpets in some religious rituals.
The front fitting has creatures and symbols molded onto it ornately, prominently featuring two monsters, one on top of the other. At the bottom is Makara, a part-elephant, part-crocodile sea monster. It’s possible, in fact, that silk-road images of Andromeda’s sea monster influenced how Makara is depicted.
These monsters may be big and scary, but they are not evil. Makara protected the god of the ocean and became a symbol of protection. Perched upon the elephant-crocodile is a mythological yali—a monstrous-appearing creature, one known for being the most fearless. Yalis are guardians, another symbol of protection.
Up north in Tibet, Buddhist rituals use different instruments, such as these rkang-gling (“leg bone flutes”), which are end-blown lip-reed aerophones. They are often blown in pairs to signal the entry of dancers and rituals connected with fierce deities. The bells of the pair below are elaborately decorated in the form of a dragon and a chu-srin, a Tibetan sea monster, both creatures associated with water and rain.
The Three-Headed Geryon
The Met in the Upper East Side is filled with game pieces, including a solitaire set, dozens of chess pieces, and even a complete set of the Ancient Chinese board game liubo. However, one of the perks of an online tour is I can teleport from The Met to the The Met Cloisters, nestled in the otherworldly peaceful Fort Tryon Park, way, way up in Manhattan. The Met Cloisters takes the historical gaming cake with the only known complete deck of 15th-century playing cards.
Quite a few medieval-era gaming pieces are on display there, including this carved disk from the game “tables,” a precursor to Backgammon. Much in the same way that handcrafted board games today can feature painted and sculpted themes, this tables piece shows Hercules, at left, killing Geryon, the three-headed monster.
In a way, the story of Python continues here. After its death, it emitted a sickly sweet odor, living on in name to Pythia, the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. After becoming induced with madness, Hercules killed his wife and children. Once he realized what he had done, he went to Pythia for guidance. As part of his atonement, he was tasked with a series of labors, including number 10: slaying Geryon, the three-headed monster.
Though Geryon is always depicted with three heads, in some forms of the myth, Geryon has three bodies too, as seen in this heavily eroded but still distinguishable statuette from the early 5th century BCE:
Even Angels Can Be Monsters
I’ll end where I began: with an image that isn’t open access. The Monster Roster was a loosely-formed group of artists in 1950s-era Chicago who were banned from an annual exhibition sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago and were named because of the monstrous, dark aesthetic in their art. A four-foot tall “harvest angel” that has been abstracted into deformity by Monster Roster member Evelyn Statsinger is currently on view in The Met’s airy contemporary galleries.
Lovely article! But one note,
"Python failed, however, and Hera gave birth to twins: Apollo and Artemis." In the previous sentences it was Leto who was pregnant with the twins.