Met Museum audio guide,
five stops, free.

A whole Egyptian temple, indoors, in Manhattan, with Central Park on the other side of the glass. Start by walking to the far side of the pool and looking back. The water is there for a reason: at home the temple stood on a terrace above the Nile, and the architects who built this room put a pool in front and a sloping wall behind to stand in for the river and the cliffs. The building still faces east, the way it did in Nubia.

It is not old by Egyptian standards. The emperor Augustus ordered it after Rome took Egypt, and work ran from 23 BC to 10 BC on the west bank of the Nile, about eighty kilometres south of Aswan. It was dedicated to the goddess Isis and to two local brothers, Pedesi and Pihor, who had drowned and been made gods. Augustus had himself carved on the walls making offerings to them, a Roman emperor dressed as a pharaoh, which was the point. In the sixth century Christians turned it into a church.

The reason it is here is a dam. When Egypt built the Aswan High Dam, the lake behind it was going to drown the temple for good, so in 1963 it was taken apart under a UNESCO rescue campaign. Two years later Egypt gave it to the United States as thanks for sixteen million dollars towards saving other monuments, and Jacqueline Kennedy accepted it. Then came what the newspapers called the Dendur Derby. Cairo, Illinois and Memphis, Tennessee both argued that a town named after an Egyptian city deserved an Egyptian temple. Washington wanted it on the Potomac, Boston on the Charles. The Met won in April 1967 because it promised to keep the stone indoors, away from rain and frost.

Six hundred and sixty-one blocks, six hundred and forty tons, arrived in New York in six hundred and sixty-one crates in August 1968. They waited seven years while this wing was built, and the finished temple opened in September 1978.

Now go close to the walls, on the left as you enter the temple. Among the hieroglyphs you will find names and dates in Latin letters, cut by European travellers in the eighteen hundreds when the temple was a stop on the Nile. The museum left them. They are part of the story now, the same as the emperor.

A man is about to drink poison, and he is still lecturing. That is the joke and the point of this painting. Socrates has been condemned by Athens for corrupting the young and inventing gods, he has refused the chance to escape, and here he sits on the prison bed with one hand reaching for the hemlock and the other raised in the air, mid-argument, as if the cup were a detail.

The scene comes from Plato's Phaedo, but David has edited it. Plato was a young man when his teacher died. In the painting he is the old man slumped at the foot of the bed, as if he were remembering the scene decades later and writing it down. Socrates himself was seventy, and David has made him fit and handsome, with the body of a much younger man. The friends around him fall apart in every way a person can, and the calmest figures, Socrates and Plato, are the only two dressed in bluish white.

Look at the man handing over the cup. He is turned away, his face in his free hand. His robe is the reddest thing in the picture; David keeps the reds muted at the edges and lets them build toward the centre, so your eye lands on the poison. At the back, on the stairs, a woman looks over her shoulder. That is Xanthippe, Socrates' wife, who has been sent out of the room.

This was not a royal commission. A rich young man named Charles-Michel Trudaine de la Sablière, about twenty years old, ordered it in 1786, and David took advice from a scholar of Greek on how the death actually went. Eight years later Trudaine and his brother were guillotined in the Terror, and the picture passed to the brother's widow. The Met bought it in 1931.

When it was shown at the Salon of 1787 the English painter Joshua Reynolds called it the greatest work since the Sistine Chapel. Thomas Jefferson, who was the American minister in Paris that year, went to see it and wrote that it was the best thing there. Before you move on, find the signatures. David put his full name under Crito, the friend clutching Socrates' leg, and only his initials under Plato. He was telling you which man he thought he was.

She is not looking at you. That is the first thing. The body faces you, the head turns away in profile, and the right arm twists back to a table whose legs are carved as sirens. The pose is a strain to hold, and Sargent chose it for exactly that tension. Then there is the skin, powdered to the colour of paper, and the one red ear where the powder stops.

Her name was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. She was American, born in New Orleans, married in Paris to a banker twice her age, and famous there for her beauty and her lavender face powder. Painters had been asking to paint her for years. John Singer Sargent, another American in Paris, asked too, and in February 1883 she said yes. It was not a commission. He wanted the picture for the Salon, where a sensation could make a career.

It nearly ended one. She was a terrible sitter, bored, distracted, always at a party, and Sargent complained in a letter about her unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness. He made about thirty studies at her house in Brittany before he settled on this. When the picture went up at the Salon of 1884, listed only as Portrait of Madame three stars, the right strap of the dress was painted slipping off her shoulder. Paris was appalled. The reviews called her vulgar and her skin corpse-like. A critic in Le Figaro wrote, one more struggle and the lady will be free. Her mother came to the studio in tears and asked for it to be taken down.

Sargent repainted the strap onto the shoulder, which is what you see now, and not long afterwards he left Paris for London. He kept the painting for more than thirty years. In 1916 he sold it to the Met, and in his letter to the director he wrote, I suppose it is the best thing I have ever done. A New York newspaper ran the headline: Sargent masterpiece, rejected by subject, now acquired by museum.

Look once more at the crescent in her hair. It is the moon of Diana, the hunter goddess, and it was not Sargent's idea. She wore it herself. She knew exactly what she was doing, and so did he.