Tuesday marks the 151st anniversary of the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Google is celebrating with a special Doodle on its homepage. Created by Google artist Erich Nagler, the animation features a selection of objects from the Met’s collection, and it is viewable in over 20 countries.
According to a representative for the Met, the museum and Google had originally planned for the Doodle to appear last year, which marked its 150th birthday. Its debut was postponed due to the museum’s temporary closure amid the pandemic.
[Read about the Met’s 10 most-visited exhibitions of all time.]
The 18 works showcased in the Doodle span various epochs and geographic locations, and lines connect the pieces to their respective galleries spread out across the museum. Among the ancient pieces are a sculpture of a dancer from China in the second century B.C.E.; a Cycladic marble figure playing a harp from 2800 to 2700 B.C.E.; an Egyptian sarcophagus from 1000 to 945 B.C.E.; and a terracotta neck-amphora that dates to 540 B.C.E. and is attributed to the potter and painter Exekias.
Other featured works include the tapestry The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (1495–1505); a 1789 portrait of the Comtesse de la Châtre by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun; an elaborately adorned guitar from 19th-century Italy; a beaded Lakota/Teton Sioux dress, circa 1870; a 1941 self-portrait by Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr.; and Vincent van Gogh’s 1887 Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat.
All the pieces in the Google Doodle were drawn from the Met’s Open Access program, through which 400,000 images of objects in its collection are available in the public domain. The Doodle can be found on Google’s homepage until 12 a.m. on April 14.