Revealing the key shifts in artistic enquiry across a formative period in Western art history, 'European Masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York' includes works made in reply to a vast array of social and cultural changes. In an arc that opens with the Early Renaissance and closes toward the final years of Impressionism, these paintings remind us that, at one point in time, all art is contemporary, and that artists have always turned to the past to find a way through into the future.