Since the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its hallowed gates in 1870, it has served as New York’s premier destination for The Art Date. A strange ritual that occurs in months two or three of the dating cycle, The Art Date invariably involves a couple wandering aimlessly and soberly through three floors and 19 curatorial departments, peppering their conversation with misremembered factoids from Jansen’s Art History, getting irredeemably lost and ending up in one of the rooms of period furniture, and wrapping up the whole botched date with a polyester Monet scarf from the gift shop and a boiled hotdog on the steps.

What these uninformed couples don’t know, however, is that the Met is a hotbed of romantic intrigue. You just have to know where to look, and now there's a guide. Some 160 of the Met’s pictures of lovers are collected in a single hardbound tome: From Fra Lippi’s enduringly sexy double portrait of a man and woman exchanging glances through a casement window to Riza Abbasi’s calligraphic watercolors of a canoodling couple to Brassaï's 1931 photograph of two dandies sharing a single suit. So, skip the hotdog and the Stendal Syndrome and curl up with that special someone and Christopher Lyon’s “Couples in Art: Artworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Or just check out our selections, to get a taste. Who knows, maybe Julia Margaret Cameron will put you in the mood like Marvin Gaye. 

"Couples in Art: Artworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art selected by Colin Eisler," Delmonico Books - Prestel - available at the Met Store, $29.95

To see selections of these romantic works of art, click on the slide show.