Nearly two decades have passed since the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last topped The Art Newspaper’s annual museum exhibition attendance survey with its 2001 show on Vermeer and the Delft School.

Axar.az reports citing Art Newspaper that, the US institution made a spectacular re-entry into our leaderboard this year with not just the one, but the two most popular exhibitions of 2018. Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, a Costume Institute show that boldly mixed religious works of art—including 42 ecclesiastical pieces from the Sistine Chapel sacristy—with haute couture, was seen by nearly 1.7 million people (10,919 visitors a day), breaking the Met’s previous record set in 1978 with Treasures of King Tutankhamun (nearly 1.4 million).

The largest exhibition ever mounted by the museum, Heavenly Bodies was seen by around 1.43 million people at the Met’s main Fifth Avenue location and a further 230,000 trekked uptown to Washington Heights to see its continuation at the comparatively sleepy Met Cloisters. According to the museum, the show helped set a new attendance record for the Cloisters (349,513 in total). (The Met has not previously provided us with separate figures for the Cloisters and its Fifth Avenue locations.) The Met’s other major blockbuster of 2018 was Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer (7,893 visitors a day), which presented sculpture, a painting and more than 100 drawings by the Renaissance master as well as an Instagram-friendly digital replica of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and which ranked second in our survey.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, helped the US secure a hat-trick with its free presentation of colourful installations by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh. A favourite with Instagrammers, 7,853 visitors a day immersed themselves in his large-scale fabric sculptures.