Museums: The Muses' Marble Acres

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The Missing Pot. Despite its hanging treasures, the Met under Rorimer has become vastly more than a picture gallery. Says Rorimer: "Museums have gotten into the problem of minor arts v. the so-called fine arts. Minor arts are simply things that are considered smaller." To prove that the minor arts are not always so small, Rorimer got the Hearst Foundation in 1957 to give him a lofty 45-by 47-ft. Spanish baroque choir screen, whose 60,000 Ibs. of elegant grillwork spans one of the Met's halls. Only a museum can frame a room as art, such as the Met's cubiculum, or bedroom, from the Roman town of Boscoreale on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Its wall scenes of architectural vistas help make the museum's Roman painting the best outside Italy, as well as giving a sense of the 1st century B.C. country squire's yearning for civility. The private study of a 15th century Italian duke, Federigo da Montefeltro, a Renaissance humanist, is a fool-the-eye masterwork; the tiny think chamber appears to have cabinets popping open with navigational tools, books and musical instruments. It is all illusion, a 91-foot cube for a pensive nobleman to fail-safe in.

As a total museum, the Met embraces all the muses. In its collection are 4,000 musical instruments from a baroque organ to Alpine zithers; and the museum's three Stradivarius violins are regularly lent for concerts in the Met's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Its priceless collection of 1,450 Greek pots includes all the known shapes of Attic vases across three centuries, except for one, an elusive type of lekythos. One corner of the museum contains an unequaled war lord's ransom of well-wrought jade in the Heber R. Bishop collection.

To maintain the U.S.'s only museum collection of medieval armor, the Met has a 200-piece set of armorer's tools, some dating to the 16th century, including yard-long shears. In the penthouse studio, the restorers ("Most important men here," says Rorimer) contemplate a Renaissance Piero di Cosimo for months before attempting to remedy a millimeter's flaking. In the dungeon basements, a crusty bronze Vishnu lies in a vat of alkali soaking nearly a year until cleanliness restores it to godliness.

How to Unwrap a Mummy. Getting new art works is half the fun. But Rorimer collects objects with objectivity. He did not blink at buying a couple of lumpy 10th century Persian ivory chess pieces for a four-figure price. They are not so pretty, but they are as scarce as pterodactyls' teeth. The Met prefers to buy what collectors do not favor. Not enough French impressionists and postimpressionists? Indeed, the museum has only 28 Degas, 26 Monets, 22 Renoirs, 16 Cézannes and seven Van Goghs. But that is because Rorimer is in no hurry to buy at the top of the market. Death and taxes will funnel private prizes into the public domain. Just before last July 1, when tax revisions ended the practice of deducting charitable gifts now and relinquishing them after death, 41 major donors bequeathed their collections to the Met; one so far unannounced donation would alone fill ten galleries.