Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

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Power & Privilege

These articles address how art can create and challenge power and privilege.

The Paradox of the Fool

Unpack the peculiar ways the jester challenged the medieval social order

Secrets of the Tudor Archives

Hear from a scholar whose recent discoveries in British archives have transformed our understanding of these artists and their royal sitters.

The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England Virtual Opening

Join curators Elizabeth Cleland and Adam Eaker to explore The Tudors, which traces the transformation of the arts in Tudor England through more than 100 objects.

Detail of the Astronomicum Caesareum

Using the Astronomicum Caesareum Book

This most sumptuous of all Renaissance instructive manuals explained the use of the astrolabe and other instruments used for computing planetary positions

A metallic black and gold texture

Immaterial: Metals, Part Two

Let’s talk about the metals that break the rules.
Limestone Assyrian relief with a low-relief carving of two men bearing gifts

Keeping Culture Alive

Two scholars consider the displacement of Assyrian people and their art
Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula

Debunking the Myth of Whiteness

Two scholars discuss misconceptions about race and polychromy in the ancient world
Iron map of The Death of Socrates

The Death of Socrates: New Discoveries

Technical examination of Jacques Louis David’s masterpiece reveals that the refinements seen in the artist’s preparatory drawings didn’t end when he began painting—rather, they continued through all stages of its execution.

A painting of the philosopher Socrates speaking before a crowd

Prisons Real and Imagined

In Jacques Louis David’s The Death of Socrates (1787), a parable of principle on the eve of the French Revolution.

A high-contrast view of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's "Why Born Enslaved!" from behind with her profile showing

Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast

This podcast features artists discussing works from the exhibition and themes that arise in representations of the Black figure in Western art
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