In other words: welcome to the dollhouse, the morgue, the cabinet of curiosities, the surgical amphitheater, the last days of Christ (and the French monarchy); the circus, the sideshow, the travails of Christian martyrs and the Greek Golden Age as resurrected by the Romans, the Renaissance and Neo-Classicism. Although it sometimes turns a bit monotonous, and, by the end, morbid, the show gives evidence of Western art’s not entirely healthy obsession with realism, as well as the resurgence of sculpture in recent decades.

Many pieces will radically expand your sense of an artist’s sensibility or achievement. Antonio Canova’s half-size treatment of the legendary Greek pugilist Creugas shows this ultrarefined artist crosshatching and tinting plaster until it looks like gently roughened wood, and it’s dazzling. I was stopped in my tracks by Nancy Grossman’s monumental “Male Figure” of 1971, a three-quarter musclebound body in bondage — black leather corset, multiple zippers and belts. Its curves are reminiscent of Michelangelo’s “Slave,” or Mae West. (Unfortunately for selfie takers, the piece is not allowed to be photographed.)

The progression of techniques, especially painted wax and polychrome wood, through the ages, is fascinating, though a serious gap is the great Late Gothic German linden wood sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, missing despite the Met’s magisterial 2000 retrospective. An exciting — and vulnerable — inclusion is the Iranian-born artist Reza Aramesh, who uses the polychrome technique (linden wood included) to depict a Palestinian youth stripped down to his underwear at an Israeli checkpoint. He has much in common with his neighbor, Alonso Berruguete’s 16th-century polychrome-wood martyr, “Saint Sebastian” — except his snail-shell curls are those of a Greek god.