The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a collection of Renaissance and Baroque art and has been promised a gift of more than 200 works by Dick Wolf. The Met announced on Wednesday that it would create two galleries with his name after he donated a significant amount of money. Wolf has been a discreet collector in the art world, focusing his attention on older works at a time when the most well-known collectors invest in modern and contemporary art. A 15th-century Botticelli painting that sold for $4.7 million in 2012 is one of the recent purchases that he promised to give to the museum. Wolf is donating a piece by the artist's daughter, Artemisia, which sold for $2.1 million that same year, to the newly reopened European paintings galleries. Dick Wolf said he used to visit the Met when he was a child.
The director and chief executive of the Met said that he and the curators cultivated a relationship with a television producer over the last three years, but he stayed away from giving advice to the market.