Former Graduate Intern Kalyani Madhura Ramachandran explores three of the paintings now on view in The Royal Hunt: Courtly Pursuits in Indian Art that depict the royal hunt in Mughal India.

The vast Asian landmass, so often viewed as a monolith from outside, is, in fact, a complex region of cultural diversity and distinctive national traditions that have developed continuously for nearly 5,000 years. By the third millennium B.C., China, for example, seems to have created the social, political, and artistic organization that has continued to the present day. This volume presents a panoramic vision of the artistic and cultural developments in Asia as illustrated by masterpieces in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Objects seen here span the centuries, from the ritual vessels fashioned by the Chinese in the Bronze Age to the Japanese prints that revolutionized the vision of the early French Impressionists in the nineteenth century. A great body of work, in an awesome variety of mediums—painting and calligraphy; icons, both sculpted and painted; ritual vessels from the Bronze Age; elegant ceramics; exquisitely carved jades; sumptuous lacquers; and elaborate textiles—provides a multidimensional view of this fascinating world. The strong religious links between the Asian nations, as well as their individuality, are witnessed by a sampling of the great Buddhist art that surfaced, in different guises, throughout the area. There is the elegant sixth-century bronze Gandharan Buddha from the Indian subcontinent; the Zao Gongen—a uniquely Japanese eleventh-century version of Buddha; the majestic fourteenth-century wall painting The Assembly of the Buddha Sakyamuni from Shansi province in China; and the tenth-century painted ceramic statue of a lohan (Buddhist disciple) found in a mountain cave in China where it had survived centuries of dynastic struggles. As art is a mirror of the society that produces it, in this volume we see the graciousness of the life of the scholar-gentleman in old-world China through the Astor Court, the refined beauty of the decorative screens of the Japanese Ogata Korin, the rich subtlety of costumes designed for the Nō Theater in Japan, stately golden earrings from the first century B.C. in India, and a magnificent eleventh-century bronze statue of a Cambodian goddess. Almost 140 objects are reproduced in full color, creating a vibrant portrait of Asia through the centuries.

Ancient Gandhara, located in the rugged foothills of the Himalayas in what is today northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan, was for centuries a thriving center of trade along the Silk Road linking China, South Asia, and the Mediterranean. Gandhara's strategic position and wealth attracted many invaders, including the Greeks, Parthians, and Kushans, who brought with them diverse religious traditions and artistic conventions. Much of Gandharan art is thus a compelling fusion of foreign styles that ultimately gave visual form to the region's Buddhist religious ideals. Buddhism, which had emerged from north India, was embraced by the Gandharan people, whose wealth gave them the means to invest large sums of money in the construction of Buddhist monasteries and sacred areas. More sculpture and architecture made in the service of Buddhism has been found in Greater Gandhara than in any other part of ancient South Asia. Among the earliest remains from Gandhara are luxury items found in urban centers, including intricately carved stone dishes, jewelry, and trade goods carved in bone or ivory, dating from the second century B.C. to the first century A.D. The first art associated with Buddhism dates to the early first century A.D., when carved reliefs embellishing religious architecture began to appear. These reliefs typically illustrate important episodes from the biography of the Buddha, such as his birth, first sermon, and death. Following a gradual decline in the narrative sculptural tradition, devotional images of Buddhas and bodhisattvas began to appear: iconic representations that were meant to be associated with major concepts in the religion. In Gandhara devotional sculptures grew dramatically in size from about the late fourth to early fifth century A.D., at the same time as their iconography became ever more complex. By the late fifth century A.D., the patronage of Buddhist monuments in Gandhara had begun to decline, but in Afghanistan this artistic tradition flourished until about the eighth century A.D. It was during this late phase in Afghanistan when devotional representations of Buddhas and bodhisattvas reached truly monumental proportions, such as the famous Buddhas at Bamiyan. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is fortunate to have in its collections a broad and artistically rich sampling of Gandharan art from almost all phases of the region's history, including a unique bronze statuette of the Buddha Shakyamuni from about the first to second century A.D. In surveying these important works, this volume relies on the latest scholarship to refine our understanding of Gandhara's complex cultural history as well as its evolving artistic traditions.

Managing Horticulturist Caleb Leech details the medieval tradition behind the holiday decorations at The Met Cloisters and invites visitors to celebrate the season at the Museum through January 9, 2017.

On our first day in Nepal we visited the Swayambhunath Stupa, a monument that, while founded in the fifth century to house the relics of the Buddha, has since undergone many restorations funded by the devout.

In honor of the institution’s 150th year, this publication celebrates the 203 collectors who committed more than 2,500 works of art to The Met for the sesquicentennial. These meaningful additions change the ways in which we think about the Museum’s holdings and deepen the stories The Met can tell about all the works in the collection. Highlights featured in this volume include an imposing stone head from an Egyptian sarcophagus; an opulent horse armor commissioned by King Philip IV of Spain; a Tibetan war mask; an early American daguerreotype; Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s enigmatic watercolor; an early twentieth-century Japanese bamboo shrine cabinet; poignant photographs made by Robert Frank for his iconic series The Americans; the Cuban American artist Carmen Herrera’s 1949 tondo Iberic; Steve Miller’s 1961 Gibson guitar; important works by Georg Baselitz; art from the Iranian Saqqakhana school; the vibrant bark painting of Aboriginal Australian artist Nonggirrnga Marawili; and recent creations by artists such as Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Robert Gober, and Wangechi Mutu.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, originally launched in 2000, presents the Met's collection via a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of global art history. Targeted at students and scholars of art history, it is an invaluable reference, research, and teaching tool. Authored by The Met's experts—curators, conservators, scientists, and educators—the Timeline comprises 300 timelines, more than 1,000 essays, more than 7,000 objects, and is regularly updated and enriched to provide new scholarship and insights on the collection.

There are now over 400 Italian paintings in the Metropolitan Museum, some 140 of them acquired in the thirty-year period since the Museum published a catalogue of its Italian works. Here is the first volume of a greatly enlarged and extensively revised catalogue. It will be followed by a volume on the Venetian school, another on the North Italian school, and a volume including the Sienese, Central, and South Italian schools. In the present book the paintings are discussed in chronological order, or as close to this as the evidence permits. A brief biography of each artist is given, and virtually all the paintings in the catalogue are illustrated. The author is an internationally known authority in the field of Italian painting. His assistant is Associate Curator in the Museum's Department of European Paintings.