pegasus At the Met, an Ancient Balm for the Depths of Winter

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is, in these darkest days of midwinter, one of the city’s spiritual hot spots, thanks to the harmonic convergence of two outstanding and very different exhibitions, both closing soon.

On a visit to the treasure-chest display called “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350,” a survey of religious art from one of Italy’s major alt-Renaissance art capitals, you’ll find yourself wandering hushed paths among grave-faced saints — ordinary people stunned into wisdom by grace.

“Siena” has been pulling in a lot of foot traffic since it opened, but another show of comparable size and beauty, “Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet,” seems to be less traveled. Celestials are gathered in force here, too. But their vibe is different. They encircle you, as if alert to your attention. They smile and snarl, boogie and plié, all against jewel-bright geometric designs that pulse with a dance-floor beat.

Mandalas — the word has roots in a Sanskrit word for “round” or “surround” — come in many forms, the most common being paintings. Some 50 examples, large and small, most from the 11th to the 15th centuries, make up the bulk of this show organized by Kurt Behrendt, the Met’s associate curator of South Asian art.

Like most religious objects, mandalas are conceived to be spiritually functional, though judging by descriptions in the exhibition catalog, their function seems not to be fixed. Depending on the account, painted mandalas can serve as GPS-style guides to the cosmos; as attention-sharpening aids to meditation; and as learner’s manuals in the ways and means of personal salvation as prescribed by Buddhist disciplines.

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Thinning of the cortex is not necessarily bad; some scientists frame the process as the brain rewiring itself as it matures, increasing its efficiency. But the process is known to accelerate in stressful conditions, and accelerated thinning is correlated with depression and anxiety.

“A third of the bacteria and slightly more of the fungi can be considered potential human pathogens,” said Xavier Rodó, a computational ecologist at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, who led the work.

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