Know-It-All Snot-Nosed Punk Points Out Mistake in Met Map
During a visit with his mom to The Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer, 13-year-old Benjamin Lerman Coady of West Hartford, Connecticut, learned a valuable lesson: Museums can sometimes be wrong.
A seventh-grader and amateur historian, Benjamin discovered that a map in the Met's exhibit on the Byzantine Empire was incorrect. Claiming to show the empire at its largest under 6th century ruler Justinian the Great, Benjamin noted that the map neglected to cover parts of Africa and Spain.
Having recently studied the subject in school, Benjamin informed the front desk, which flippantly told him to fill out a form and get off their lawn. "The front desk didn't believe me," he told the Hartford Courant. "I'm only a kid."
Not expecting to hear back, Benjamin was surprised to receive a letter from the museum's Byzantine art curator Helen Evans a few months later informing him that he was, "of course, correct about the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire under Justinian."
He was invited to the museum to meet with her, and was treated to a private tour, as well as a sneak peek at a new exhibit.
As for the map, Evans said it might be a while before a new one is drawn up by a mapmaker, but Benjamin has been hard at work on crafting a replacement for the museum to use in the meantime.
The moral of this story? "If you have a question, always ask it," Benjamin said. "Always take chances."
