Museum adding to gallery space

NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Museum of Art is expanding its gallery space, spending almost $180 million to display some of the world's finest classical artworks, which have been sitting in storage.

"We have a sacred obligation to put this material on view," director Philippe de Montebello said Tuesday at a news conference in the Met's Roman Court, a soaring space with a high skylight ceiling and limestone columns that is the centerpiece of the project.

The construction on the south side of the Fifth Avenue building will also produce a real-life image that has been missing for half a century: a view of Central Park through Met windows. The windows were shuttered for years to accommodate the kitchen of the museum cafeteria, which has been moved to another part of the building.

Many of the stored works have not been seen by the public in decades, including "Sleeping Eros," a Greek bronze sculpture depicting the naked, winged god of love asleep on rock.

It is among about 5,000 stored artworks and objects from ancient Greece and Rome that are to join the 2,500 such pieces already on view. The Met's new galleries also will house 12,000 objects of Islamic art dating from the seventh to the 19th centuries and spanning Muslim cultures from Spain to India.

The additional 57,000 square feet of galleries will be created from existing space that in recent years has been used for administrative and other activities supporting the museum's 1 million square feet of exhibition areas.

The Roman-style court — the site of the cafeteria until last summer — is to be named the Leon Levy and Shelby White Roman Court after the late financier and collector and his wife, who is a Met trustee. A mezzanine gallery overlooking the court will feature a richly decorated Etruscan chariot that had been stored since the early 1990s.

Construction, which will begin immediately, is to be completed by spring 2007 at an estimated cost of $155 million, with another $22 million earmarked for operating costs.

The project caps a decadelong drive to raise $650 million, a goal that has been met and exceeded, museum spokesman Harold Holzer said. With $680 million from that effort in its coffers, the Met is looking for another $250 million to cover the current construction, for a total of $900 million, the biggest fund-raising campaign ever for a museum, art experts believe.

The stored works trace five millennia of human creativity that includes a collection of 19th-century paintings and sculptures plus modern art and photography.

The vast array of Roman artifacts ranges from gold jewelry, gems and cameos to portraits of the emperors Augustus and Caligula, an ornate sarcophagus depicting the triumph of the god Dionysus and frescoes in the reconstructed bedroom