Museums: The Muses' Marble Acres

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Renaissance Fantasia. Passing from gallery to gallery becomes a kind of progressive Elysian cocktail party. Nowhere in the world does such a trio of great Manets dominate a wall as do the Met's three restored portraits in Spanish costumes. El Greco's alabaster Cardinal Niño de Guevara glowers within sight of the Spanish master's only landscape, View of Toledo, and his last great commission, St. John's Vision. In adjacent quarters Poussin's Sabine women are abducted in the passionless postures of French neoclassic actors. Through another doorway the visitor is delivered into 18th century England, attended by four Gainsboroughs, three Reynolds portraits, a Romney, and a dozen other chamois-cheeked countenances that peer down, mellow within their lacework gilt frames, between ornate black marble period fireplaces.

"Just to show a Syrian head and say it's beautiful is not enough," says Rorimer. He relates pieces chronologically so that visitors stumble without accident upon one masterpiece that helps explain another. The Met's collection of Islamic art lines a corridor that logically leads to a 14th century tiled mihrab (prayer niche), as magically multicolored as a Persian carpet. To show the effervescent character of baroque art, a huge, gilded 17th century harpsichord is placed against a wall of Tiepolo's levitating flights of linear fancy. And in the center of a room coated with Italian 16th century masters rests Benvenuto Cellini's great cup, a Renaissance fantasia 7½ in. high, in which a turtle and a dragon balance a seashell in gold, enamel and pearls.

Don't Caress the Curple. The man who has presided over the Met for nearly a decade works tucked away in a tapestry-lined office on a floor between ancient Etruscan pottery, above, and Greco-Roman statuary, below. Son of a Cleveland interior designer, Rorimer has been at home at the Met ever since his 1927 graduation from Harvard. A fervent medievalist and devotee of the decorative arts, he named his children Louis and Anne after the late 15th century French monarchs, Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, whose marriage was celebrated by the weaving of the Unicorn tapestries, which Rorimer acquired for the Met. He was director of the Met's Rockefeller-endowed, monastery-like Cloisters, overlooking the Hudson, from its very inception, when he virtually designed it by staking out full-scale mock-ups in burlap. Chosen from among 150 potential candidates to become director in 1955, he today heads up a curatorial staff of 128, administers a budget of $4,800,000 ($1,300,000 provided by the city), has behind him a war chest of more than $1,000,000 available for new acquisitions.

But even after leading the Met through a decade of spectacular growth, Rorimer still prowls the museum like a bemused headmaster. Wearing ankle-high combat boots that go back to his Army days,* he roams the halls, wiping dust off display cases, bellowing "Please don't touch the art objects!" when kids tweak a sphinx's beard, or sternly lecturing an adult caressing a caryatid's curple: "That's 4,000 years old. If everyone who saw that had touched it, it wouldn't be here!"