The Good Life: Collecting Late Antique Art at the Met

Medallion with a Mother and Child, early 4th century, glass and gold leaf, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Good Life: Collecting Late Antique Art at The Met showcases the Museum’s important and rare collection of third- to eighth-century art from Egypt and reevaluates it through the lens of late antique ideas about abundance, virtue, shared classical taste, and visual representations of a life well lived. The first decades after the Museum’s founding was a time when profound interest in the earliest Christian art inspired scholars, collectors, and the public, and the core of this collection was formed through public subscriptions and generous gifts in the 1890s.