The rehanging of the European collection is even more Spartan than that of the Egyptian galleries, though the exhibition space itself — basically, the walkway surrounding the rotundalike Beaux-Arts Court on the third floor — is a continuing problem. Because the museum uses the space for social events, paintings must be sealed behind protective glass, which reflects light filtering down from the skylight. Richard Aste, a curator of European art, has dealt with this handicap as best he can, partly by placing some of the collection elsewhere, in an anteroom right off the third-floor elevator.

There, you get a quick hit of the variety and quality of the museum’s holdings in a jaunty little painting of a female nude by Lucas Cranach the Elder; a major, dusky one by Degas; and a gender-teasing Egon Schiele self-portrait, accompanied by a distinctly un-Met wall label commenting on Western art’s relentless objectification of women. (Schiele objectified himself, which is different.) And in front of this textured ensemble stands Rodin’s bronze Balzac, a monument to defiantly out-of-shape middle age.

There’s more Rodin around the court — the museum owns a ton — and a selection of paintings arranged by no-nonsense themes: religion, portraiture, landscape. Nardo di Cione’s great 14th-century altarpiece really does look great. Brooklyn itself gets a nod in portraits of Washington A. Roebling and his wife, Emily Warren Roebling. (He initiated construction of the Brooklyn Bridge; she saw it to completion.)

Of the landscapes, Vasily Vereshchagin’s circa 1877 eyewitness view of prisoners’ freezing to death on a snow-clogged road during the Russo-Turkish War is the least familiar and most memorable. With its barely visible corpses it’s a whited-out horror scene, like the photographs taken of the Lakota dead on the battlefield at Wounded Knee just over a decade later.