January 2009

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Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

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Indeed, curator Keith Christiansen, the Met’s renaissance specialist, recalls that ‘Hoving left behind a hotbed of discontent’, and that it took quite some time for attitudes to improve as de Montebello settled into the role of director. When the improve-ments came, however, they were dramatic. ‘One of Philippe’s greatest strengths is that you know he’ll always listen to you’, Christiansen says. ‘He won’t always agree with you, but he’ll always listen. And part of Philippe’s legacy is that most of the people who work here now enjoy working here.’

The upcoming exhibition is a testament to how deep that sentiment runs at the Met. Intended as ‘a gift to Philippe’, in the words of the museum’s curator of Byzantine art, Helen Evans, who is coordinating the show, it is to be displayed in the Tisch Galleries, the museum’s largest. It will contain nearly 300 objects, varying in size from Jasper Johns’s monumental White Flag (whose sensuous surface and feeling for matière de Montebello says he greatly admires) to a quarter-inch button promoting the abolition of slavery, made around 1850. ‘The entire museum has come together for this’, Evans notes, ‘with everyone trying to do their part, trying to show how much Philippe has mattered to them.’

The star of ‘The Philippe de Montebello Years’ will undoubtedly be Duccio’s Madonna and Child (Fig. 1). A gold-ground painting of unusual expressive intensity, it was bought in 2004 for a reported $45m, making it the Met’s most expensive acquisition ever. The last Duccio in private hands, the Madonna and Child was brought to de Montebello’s attention by Christiansen, who initially held out little hope of obtaining it, as the asking price far exceeded the museum’s normal budget. Indeed, the painting, whose purchase required substantial contributions from private benefactors and special funds, could never have come to the Met had de Montebello not been personally convinced of its transformative value for the collection when he inspected the picture at Christie’s. ‘I held it in my hands for a solid two hours in London’, de Montebello recalls. ‘It is small, but it grows vast in the imagination.’