Museums behind the timeline

About this map

When I visit art history museums, I photograph the works. For me a museum is where you truly see a work: in person, in its physical presence. It is an experience you simply have to have, and scrolling on a screen cannot replace it. So I look, I absorb and I capture, so that I can go on studying the works long after I have left the galleries. I don't take these pictures to post once and move on. I come back to them. I read about the works, I look for what the label did not say, and some of them lead me into weeks of research.

This map gathers a few of the museums I have visited, with some of the pieces I saw there. I have thousands of photographs, so this is a small selection, not a catalogue: one or two works for each museum, and links to the essays where I went deeper.

Many of them come from one building. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is my home museum, and its Greek and Roman galleries are where my art history timeline began, with works like the Diadoumenos. Others I found farther away: a girl playing knucklebones in Berlin, a round painting by Raffaellino del Garbo in the Gemäldegalerie, an icon of the Royal Martyrs in an Orthodox church in Strasbourg. And the Egyptian Museum in Cairo is where, as a child, it all started; I wrote about that visit in How an Early Childhood Museum Experience Shaped My Life.

The open pins are museums I recommend for the same periods, even where I have not photographed yet. I will add to the map as I travel, and some stops may one day have short films of the rooms.

If you know a museum that belongs here, or a work I should see on my next visit, tell me.

The photographs are my own except where credited beside the picture.