Associate Curator Jayson Dobney continues his celebration of National Piano Month by highlighting another set of instruments from the Museum's collection.

Associate Curator Jayson Dobney says farewell to National Piano Month by showcasing five additional examples of historic instruments from the Museum's collection—including the oldest extant piano in the world.

Associate Curator Jayson Dobney celebrates National Piano Month by highlighting some of the breathtaking instruments found in the Museum's collection.

Art critic and host of the Modern Art Notes Podcast Tyler Green tells the history of how Thomas Cole and Ralph Waldo Emerson set the stage for national parks in the United States.

Among the gorgeous garments on display in the exhibition American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity (closing August 15) is an exquisite black evening dress attributed to Madame Marie Gerber of the house of Callot Soeurs. I spoke with Andrew Bolton, curator in the Met's Costume Institute, about the dress's bold design and glamorous, influential owner.

One of the most lavishly illustrated codices of the Middle Ages, the Belle Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry (ca. 1405–1408/9), is the only manuscript with miniatures executed entirely by the famed Limbourg brothers. Commissioned by its royal patron, this richly illuminated Book of Hours, intended for private devotion and now housed in The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, belonged to the duke's large collection of prized possessions. The luminous scenes depicting the legends of the saints, the Hours of the Virgin, and the like, many with elaborately designed borders, exemplify the transcendent splendor of the Limbourg brothers' talents. Jean de France, duc de Berry—the son, brother, and uncle of three successive kings of France—commissioned the Belles Heures as an addition to his luxurious possessions ranging from illuminated manuscripts and goldsmith work, to castles throughout the French countryside. A discriminating patron, Jean de France selected the Limbourg brothers to create this Book of Hours, allowing the young boys (who were in their early teens throughout the duration of the project) a rare latitude for inventively designing the work. In this volume, the Limbourgs provided the customary components of a Book of Hours, including readings from the Gospels and prayers to the Virgin. The Belles Heures, however, was elevated to unprecedented heights by the addition of seven "picture book" insertions. These pages provided a framework for developing the Limbourg's figural style, refining their palette, experimenting with light and surface values, and devising coherent compositional formulas that focused the dramatic charge of the image. These illuminations, both sacred and secular in subject, range from traditional scenes of Christ's life and ministry to images reflecting the turbulence of the period, such as victims struck by the plague. Timothy B. Husband's expert scholarship positions the manuscript, its artists, and its patron in context with other objects in the duke's collection and the sources and inspiration of the art. He meticulously charts the components of the codex, its organization and decoration, sequence of production, and the compositional intelligence of the narrative cycles. He places the Belles Heures within the trajectory of fifteenth-century manuscript illumination, delineating the development of the Limbourgs throughout their short careers. A lyrically written central chapter in this volume describes each illumination in the Belles Heures in formal terms and provides selected transcriptions and English translations of the Latin text. A technical essay by Margaret Lawson offers invaluable insight into the structure of the manuscript and the methods by which it was created. Photomicrographs, taken during Lawson's examination of the pages under high magnification, give the reader unprecedented close-up views of the artists' precision. All of the illuminations in the manuscript are reproduced in color, many of them the same size as the original.

Only two major exhibitions from the fabled Chinese Palace Museum collections have been seen in the West—the first in London in 1935–36 and the second in the United States in 1961–62. These two exhibitions provided an extraordinary stimulus to the study of Chinese culture, revolutionized Asian art studies in the West, and opened the eyes of the public to the artistic traditions of Chinese civilization. Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei is the publication that accompanies the third great exhibition of Chinese masterworks to travel to the West. Written by scholars of both Chinese and Western cultural backgrounds and conceived as a cultural history, the book tells the story of Chinese art from its foundations in the Bronze Age and the first empires through the rich diversity of art produced during the Sung, Yuan, Ming, and Ch'ing dynasties, contrasting China's absolutist political structure with the humanism of its artistic and moral philosophy. Synthesizing scholarship of the past three decades, the authors present not only the historical and cultural significance of individual works of art and analyses of their aesthetic content, but a reevaluation of the cultural dynamics of Chinese history, reflecting a fundamental shift in the study of Chinese art from a focus on documentation and connoisseurship to an emphasis on the cultural significance of the visual arts. National treasures passed down from dynasty to dynasty, the works of art that now form the collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, originally constituted the personal collection of the Ch'ien-lung emperor, who ruled China from 1736 to 1795. Two centuries after Ch'ien-lung ascended the dragon throne, when the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the nearly 10,000 masterworks of painting and calligraphy and more than 600,000 objects and rare books and documents—which had earlier been moved from Peking to Nanking following the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931—were packed in crates and evacuated to caves near the wartime capital, Chungking. It was not until after World War II that the crated treasures were moved to their present home in Taiwan, where today they represent a major portion of China's artistic and cultural legacy. Drawing on this extraordinary collection, the authors explore in depth four interrelated themes: a cyclical view of history, the Confucian discourse on art, the social function of art, and possessing the past. The last theme, from which the volume takes its title, refers both to imperial China's possession of its past through the art of collecting and to the broader cultural tradition of embracing change through the creative reinterpretation of the past. This major scholarly publication will expand our understanding and deepen our appreciation of works of art that over the centuries have emerged from a remarkable and, in the West, still largely unexplored culture.

The collection of the National Palace Museum is made up largely of the personal holdings of the Ch'ien-lung emperor (reigned 1736–95). Representing the artistic legacy of imperial China, it offers an unsurpassed view of Chinese civilization. The objects lavishly illustrated and described in this book, which include magnificent ritual bronzes, precious jades, monumental landscape paintings, and exquisite ceramics, are among the finest ever created. Published to accompany the exhibition "Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei," the book takes the reader through the most significant periods of Chinese culture: its foundations in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, its flowering in the sophisticated world of the Sung dynasty, its exuberance during the Ming, and its technical brilliance under the Manchus. The author makes the unique beauty of this art accessible through comparisons of selected works and through discussion of their historical context.