Frieze fragment

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Decorative reliefs like this one (see also 17.190.754), composed of masks, vines, and hybrid creatures – part human, part animal or plant – proliferated in the decades around 1500. Inspired by ancient sculpture, particularly Roman sarcophagi, they provided profuse detail and variety for the architectural frameworks of chapels, altars, and shrines in Venice. Renaissance sculptors routinely appropriated antique ornament, taming pagan motifs for a Christian context. [Peter J. Bell, 2015]

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art