Former High School Intern Julia S. visits an eighteenth-century period room and feels transported back to the age of Marie Antoinette.

Assistant Conservator Emeline Baude discusses her recent use of laser-cleaning techniques on two capitals at The Cloisters.

This Bulletin accompanies Rayyane Tabet's site-specific installation, which responds to four carved stone reliefs from the ancient site of Tell Halaf, in modern Syria. Now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ancient carvings traveled here under the aegis of the World War I–era Alien Property Act. Approaching this complex history from three perspectives, the text includes a historical discussion of the reliefs—from ancient times to their journey to The Met—by Kim Benzel, Curator in Charge of The Met's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art; a personal account by Rayyane Tabet that chronicles the experiences of his great-grandfather, who worked for Max von Oppenheim, the original excavator of Tell Halaf; and an essay that explores Tabet's installation in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic practice by Clare Davies, Assistant Curator in The Met's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Tabet's work and the three narratives presented in the Bulletin highlight the entangled, complex histories of cultural artifacts in museum collections while emphasizing their power to educate audiences about the ancient world. The Met's connection to Tell Halaf and its artifacts surfaces important contemporary conversations about the evolving role of encyclopedic museums.

Managing Horticulturist Caleb Leech announces the blooming winter aconite and discusses its early history.

For Blake, the Bible was the greatest work of poetry ever written, and comprised the basis of true art, as opposed to the false, pagan ideal of Classicism.

When academic ideals faced challenges in the later nineteenth century, the delicate status of the nude was quickly exposed and subverted.

Artist Nayland Blake reflects on _boli_ in this episode of The Artist Project.

Join contemporary artist Rayyane Tabet on a tour of his exhibition Rayyane Tabet / Alien Property.

Friends, rivals, and at times antagonists, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas maintained a pictorial dialogue throughout their lives as they both worked to define the painting of modern urban life. Manet/Degas, the first book to consider their careers in parallel, investigates how their objectives overlapped, diverged, and shaped each other’s artistic choices. Enlivened by archival correspondence and records of firsthand accounts, essays by American and French scholars take a fresh look at the artists’ family relationships, literary friendships, and interconnected social and intellectual circles in Paris; explore their complex depictions of race and class; discuss their political views in the context of wars in France and the United States; compare their artistic practices; and examine how Degas built his personal collection of works by Manet after his friend’s premature death. An illustrated biographical chronology charts their intersecting lives and careers. This lavishly illustrated, in-depth study offers an opportunity to reevaluate some of the most canonical French artworks of the nineteenth century, including Manet’s Olympia, Degas’s The Absinthe Drinker, and other masterworks.