Metropolitan Museum of Art

The grand dame of New York art institutions, the Met has been a cornerstone of New York City culture since its founding in 1870. A must-see destination for tourists and art connoisseurs alike, the Met contains a multitude of art-historical universes with holdings that date as far back as 5,000 years.

The Met has the largest floor area of any museum in the world, measuring two million square feet in total. The museum also has one of the world’s largest collections with 1.5 million objects ranging from the minuscule (a skull-shaped 17th-century Japanese ornament for a man’s robe, called a netsuke) to the monumental (the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur).

The Met’s collection is divided among capacious spaces highlighted by the superlative Old Master galleries (filled with masterpieces by Bruegel, Caravaggio, El Greco, Rembrandt, and scores of others, including five Vermeers that represent the largest such cache in the world); the American Wing, featuring Tiffany stained glass windows and a full-scale living room interior by Frank Lloyd Wright; the Egyptian Wing, anchored by the aforementioned Temple of Dendur; the Wrightsman period rooms, which include furniture and décor once owned by Marie Antoinette; and the Arms and Armor rooms, which house, among other items, a suit of armor made for Henry VIII. Off-site, the bulk of the Met’s medieval art collection can be found in northern Manhattan at the Cloisters, where treasures from the Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic periods can be admired within the leafy environs of Fort Tryon Park.