The ceremony of capac hucha, or “royal obligation” in Quechua, reportedly occurred to mark natural events like a drought or the accession or death of an Inca ruler.

Artists of the Moche cultures excelled at the creation of “portrait vessels,” so-called for their striking apparent resemblance to specific individuals.

Whereas many [Moche decorated ceramics] were ultimately placed in burials or made especially for the dead, most were produced to be used by the living in everyday life.

In this lecture, Nuno Vassalo e Silva presents the 2018 Al Thani Lecture on the Mughal World. His lecture explores the history and global nature of Mughal jewelry.

Artist Ed Ruscha and writer Tom McCarthy discuss Thomas Cole's influence on Ruscha's art in these excerpts from a recent conversation at The Met.

In Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed, the elderly Edvard Munch stands like a sentinel in his bedroom/studio surrounded by the works that constitute his artistic legacy. A powerful meditation on art, mortality, and the ravages of time, this haunting painting conjures up the Norwegian master’s entire career. It also calls into question certain long-held myths surrounding Munch—that his work declined in quality after his nervous breakdown in 1908–9, that he was a commercially naive social outsider, and that he had only a limited role in the development of European modernism. The present volume aims to rebut such misconceptions by freshly examining this enigmatic artist. In the preface, the renowned novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard considers Munch as a fellow creative artist and seeks to illuminate the source of his distinctive talent. The four groundbreaking essays that follow present numerous surprising insights on matters ranging from Munch’s radical approach to self-portraiture to his role in promoting his own career. They also reveal that Munch has been an abiding inspiration to fellow painters, both during his lifetime and up to the present; artists as varied as Jasper Johns, Bridget Riley, Asger Jorn, and Georg Baselitz have acknowledged his influence. More than sixty of Munch’s paintings, dating from the beginning of his career in the early 1880s to his death in 1944, are accompanied by a generous selection of comparative illustrations and a chronology of the artist’s life. The result is an intimate, provocative study that casts new light on Munch’s unique oeuvre—an oeuvre that Knausgaard describes as having gone “where only a painting can go, to that which is beyond words, but which is still part of our reality.”

The Emperors' Album: Images of Mughal India is a landmark publication. Here the fifty leaves that form the Kevorkian Album, one of the world's great assemblages of Mughal art and calligraphy, are presented together for the first time. Thirty-nine leaves date from the seventeenth century; the other eleven leaves were created in the early nineteenth century and were bound with the earlier ones, most probably by a Delhi art dealer. The resulting album took its name from Hagop Kevorkian, a noted benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum and of many other cultural institutions, who purchased it in London in 1929. Over the next decades nine of the leaves went to the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and in 1951 the remaining forty-one leaves came to the Metropolitan Museum. The seventeenth-century leaves include masterpieces of Mughal portraiture, superb natural history studies, and magnificent specimens of calligraphy. Commissioned by the great emperors Jahangir and Shahjahan, these works were meant for private enjoyment—images to be shared with delight by the imperial family and their close friends. These pictures were created in the imperial ateliers by the greatest artists of the day. In Stuart Cary Welch's introduction and in the texts he has written for each painting, these artists are identified, and the biographical information available for each is given. The influences that molded their works—the Persian and Deccani conventions that were so important in the development of the Mughal style—are discussed, as are the European elements, most notable in the floral borders, which show the impact of herbals brought to India by European missionaries and traders. Welch's historical introduction is extended and expanded by the biographical essays Wheeler M. Thackston has contributed for the subjects of each of the portraits. Based on primary sources, these accounts are an invaluable overview of the Mughal world. But these great pictures make up only half the Kevorkian Album. As important are the calligraphic pages, which include specimens by major scribes, most especially Mir 'Ali. In her introduction Annemarie Schimmel discusses the paramount place accorded calligraphy in the Muslim aesthetic. She also assesses Mir-'Ali's accomplishments as a calligrapher and as a poet. The poetry in the Kevorkian Album is an anthology of the verses prized by the Mughal elite; in her comments on each of the leaves Schimmel identifies and translates this poetry. The rich borders of Mughal album leaves are extraordinary works of art in themselves. Marie L. Swietochowski's carefully argued introduction discusses not only the leaves from the Kevorkian Album but also those from the Minto and Wantage albums and from other sources. In her remarks on individual leaves from the Kevorkian Album, she comments on stylistic differences and provides identifications of plants, birds, and animals. The Emperors' Album is a book for scholar and lay person alike. Here the reader enters the heart of a civilization whose glories still shine forth, embodied in painting and script.