A couple weeks ago, I woke up at 7 a.m with the goal to explore the Met. Of course, my reason for this was a school project, just nevertheless, I was motivated to divulge myself into the works of art from different countries. After a long 2 hour commute and a 5 minute cab ride, I was at the doors of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. With a list of exhibits and statues to visit in one hand, and a camera that made me look like a tourist in the other, I walked up the stairs. It was unbelievably cold, so I was ambitious to be one of the first in line to get inside the museum. After paying my donation/ fee, I was on my way to a cultural experience I am bound never to forget. I walked up the stairs and go to the second floor, and am thrown into a room surrounding me of marble. My philosophy class has been talking of Socrates since the first week of school, and seeing a bust of his head made me laugh a bit. All semester long, I’d been hearing about how he was “ugly” and therefore no very much liked by many people. I didn’t think he was ugly at all.

 

I continued on to see statues of what should have been considered the ideal body of men in Greece in that time. Everyone was expected to go to gym because it would help society when it was time to go to war. Hercules was portrayed as a tall, curly haired, buff man. He was strong in all angles, and even his statues were able to give off an aura of power and strength. There were several of these statues, depending on the age of Hercules in each. Even in the older ones, he was quite well built. To be realistic, even today, it would be very difficult to be able to have that type of body.

 

I will share about one more work of art that I saw that particularly amazed me. Eros, or Cupid as most of us know him, is thought to be a sweet innocent baby with some arrows stuck in his diaper. The first statue that I saw was similar to this description. Eros was laid down on a rock, innocently enjoying his nap, with peace in his aura. He was still a baby in this form, and was what we like to imagine him as. In the next work that I viewed that had Eros in it was portraying him completely differently. In his hand, he has a stick that showed power. He was fully grown in this idea of him, and was very well built. He no longer looked innocent, but rather powerful and scary to a certain extent.

The ways the different portraits and statues were portrayed gave me an inside look into the life of Greeks in the time of Socrates. Long ago, the way that women and men should be was placed in very tight boundaries. He bdjjeFor the experience I got, you should definitely visit the Met as well!