At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, prime real estate has long been given over to European paintings. From the Great Hall, visitors are beckoned up the monumental staircase by the grand Tiepolo gallery, which leads on to 44 further galleries devoted to the museum’s stellar collection of Old Masters. These holdings, which number more than 700 works spanning the years 1250–1800, have now been partially and provisionally reinstalled, an undertaking necessitated by an epic housekeeping project: the replacement, in stages, of 30,000 square feet of antiquated skylights. The new installation marks the midway point of this four-year construction project (scheduled for completion in 2022), a milestone that has occasioned not only a condensed rehanging of a substantial part of the collection in just under half the usual number of galleries, but also a rethinking of how the paintings are displayed – and what stories they tell.