Exceptional loan granted to the Louvre. Until September 28, 2025, the Parisian museum will host ten major works of oriental antiquities from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York, closed for renovation work. The works in question will be integrated with those of the department of oriental antiquities of the Louvre, where they introduce “correspondences” by reconstituting sets and completing the information linked to the specific history of each piece.
From Thursday February 29, an exhibition comparing the two collections will be open to the public. It will allow you to discover these works from the Met’s Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, dating from a period between the end of the 4th millennium BC and the 5th century AD. “The exhibition travels from Iran to Mesopotamia and introduces a different way to the works of the Louvre, the oldest and one of the most complete collections in the world with 150,000 pieces, which we will better understand thanks to the works of the Met” , told AFP Ariane Thomas, French curator of the exhibition, interviewed with the American Kim Benzel, her counterpart at the Met.
As an example, Ariane Thomas cites “a fragment found in excavations at Tello, in Mesopotamia, and kept at the Louvre, making it possible to attribute and date a head acquired by the Met, until now difficult to locate in time and place. ‘space. Conversely, this head allows us to better understand to which part the only fragment found in the Louvre corresponds.
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Among the nuggets on display is “one of the very rare testimonies of goldsmithing in Mesopotamia,” according to the commissioners. According to Kim Benzel, it is “a motley collection of jewelry pieces discovered in a monetary stash, presented for decades by the Met as a necklace.” The exhibition allows us to deconstruct this story: “Looking at it for a long time, I discovered that the large pendants had been melted down, some remained unfinished or were reused,” she continues. They were probably heterogeneous pieces of goldwork which must have belonged to a jeweler, with pendants which were also divine, protective emblems, very powerful in Mesopotamia.
“This collaboration with the Louvre is unique for the Met during its renovation and will allow it to design a completely new presentation of the works when the department (of oriental antiquities) reopens at the end of 2026,” concludes the American curator.