Top 200 Collectors

How does one best situate a 700-pound sculpture from the 15th century by Luca della Robbia over a door? With the help of a “small army” of friendly art installers from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, according to Barbara and Jon Landau, who have often lent pieces from their 150-work collection to the Met. “I get tired just thinking about watching them,” Jon Landau told ARTnews. 

Among the other notable works in the Landaus’ holdings of Renaissance and Baroque art are Head of a Gorgon by Andrea del Verrocchio and Bust of Christ by father-son duo Pietro and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The Landaus also like 19th-century French and English painting; their newest acquisition is a Delacroix still life, Peonies. In 2022, the Landaus gave the Met a rare Nicolas Poussin painting that they had owned for more than 20 years.

Landau is perhaps best-known professionally for his long-standing relationship with Bruce Springsteen. As David Remnick wrote in a 2012 profile of Springsteen in the New Yorker, the profits from Jon’s lucrative managerial relationship with the Boss “went on the walls.” 

Landau’s art collection includes work by Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo, Donatello, Ghiberti, Géricault, Delacroix, and Corot. He also owns one of the largest collections of Courbet in private hands. With the exception of his family and his work, the collection, featuring Italian painting and sculpture of the 13th through 17th centuries and mid-19th-century French romantic realist painting, is now Jon’s greatest interest in life. In 2014, when the Washington Post asked him what he would go back to school for now if he had the chance, his answer was unhesitating: “I would study Renaissance art.”