The Metropolitan Museum of Art is opening a newly redesigned gallery dedicated to Northern Renaissance Sculpture and Decorative Arts following seven years of closure. The gallery brings together more than 100 collection highlights and spectacular recent acquisitions to situate the museums extraordinary permanent collection in the context of northern Europes early modern society in the 16th and 17th centuries. The thematically grouped works represent the highest level of artistry and craftsmanship during the period, from ceramics, textiles, and metalwork, to clocks, chess boards, stained glass, and more. The immersive design creates shifting ambient colored light evocative of the sacred and secular interiors of the Northern Renaissance. With this reinstallation, these objects of encounter, knowledge, wonder, and personal meaning offer a window into the past for a new generation of Met visitors. Major support for the installation of this gallery was provided by the Marina Kellen French Foundation. We have installed a very special gallery of awe, miracle, and artistry. During the 16th and 17th centuries, a remarkable outpouring of creativity and ideas gave rise to objects that were both magnificent artistic accomplishments and technological wonders, said Max Hollein, the Mets Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. Through thoughtful new displays, the stunning reinstallation of the Northern Renaissance Sculpture and Decorative Arts gallery reveals the desire to construct, claim, explain, and represent the world in singular objects and tells the fascinating and complex backstories of these works. The long-awaited reopening of the gallery will surprise and delight our visitors by the beauty of the objects on view and the compelling stories they tell, added Sarah Lawrence, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor curator in charge of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. The gallery (Gallery 520) includes works from roughly 1520 to 1630, when Europeans north of the Alpine mountains experienced civil unrest, religious revolution, and an increasingly globalized world. The dominance of the Catholic Church was destabilized as the Reformation led to the rise of various Protestant denominations. Politically, the Holy Roman Empire (9621806) dominated northern lands and linked hundreds of independent territories and Imperial city-states. Due to conflicts between religious groups, peasant wars against oppressive aristocracy, and brutal clashes with neighboring nations, social and political boundaries remained in flux. Within this complex society, art expressed ownership and belief. Royals, who competed fiercely to commission artists, understood that it instilled awe and projected power. The redesigned space explores the religious, imperial, and colonial contexts in which these objects were made. It is divided between two overarching themes: Belief, anchored with a display of stained glass on the south end of the gallery, and Knowledge, anchored with a deconstructed Kunstkammer on the north end of the gallery. The works are grouped into eight sub-themes, such as Encounter, Making, Study, and Ritual, and videos featuring select objects play on two screens in the gallery. The gallery closed in the fall of 2016 when construction work began on the adjacent British Galleries and the space was used for temporary art storage. The reopening allows for visitor flow to resume between the Northern Renaissance collection, the Lehman Wing, and the Medieval Hall, creating a seamless transition between various departments with decorative arts displays. To learn more, visit www.metmuseum.org.