A selection of prints investigate the role art has played in revolutions, protests, and social activist movements from the eighteenth century to the present.

“It seems funny to say it, but long before there was an ‘art world,’ there was art in the world.”

Publishing and Marketing Assistant Rachel High sits down with curator emerita Colta Ives to discuss the transformation of Paris during the nineteenth century into a city of tree-lined boulevards and public parks.

The spectacular transformation of Paris during the 19th century into a city of tree-lined boulevards and public parks both redesigned the capital and inspired the era’s great Impressionist artists. The renewed landscape gave crowded, displaced urban dwellers green spaces to enjoy, while suburbanites and country-dwellers began cultivating their own flower gardens. As public engagement with gardening grew, artists increasingly featured flowers and parks in their work. Public Parks, Private Gardens includes masterworks by artists such as Bonnard, Cassatt, Cézanne, Corot, Daumier, Van Gogh, Manet, Matisse, Monet, and Seurat. Many of these artists were themselves avid gardeners, and they painted parks and gardens as the distinctive scenery of contemporary life. Writing from the perspective of both a distinguished art historian and a trained landscape designer, Colta Ives provides new insights not only into these essential works, but also into this extraordinarily creative period in France’s history.

Teen Advisory Group Member Jamilah writes about what the ideal woman looked like during the Renaissance.

Conservator Lucretia Kargère describes her public conservation of the tomb effigy of Jean d'Alluye at The Cloisters.

In 1996 mosaics were accidentally uncovered during highway construction in the modern Israeli town of Lod, not far from Tel Aviv (see map). Lod is ancient Lydda, which was destroyed by the Romans in a.d. 66 during the Jewish War. Refounded by Hadrian as Diospolis, Lydda was awarded the rank of a Roman colony under Septimius Severus in a.d. 200.

The New Woman was a global ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art.

Among glass craftsman active in the 1st century A.D., the most famous and gifted was Ennion, who hailed from the coastal city of Sidon in modern Lebanon. Ennion’s glass stood out for its quality and popularity. His products are distinguished by the fine detail and precision of their relief decoration, which imitates designs found on contemporaneous silverware. This compact, but thorough volume examines the most innovative and elegant known examples of Roman mold-blown glass, providing a uniquely comprehensive, up-to-date study of these exceptional works. Included are some twenty-six remarkably preserved examples of drinking cups, bowls, and jugs signed by Ennion himself, as well as fifteen additional vessels that were clearly influenced by him. The informative texts and illustrations effectively convey the lasting aesthetic appeal of Ennion’s vessels, and offer an accessible introduction to an ancient art form that reached its apogee in the early decades of the Roman Empire.

A conservator describes the techniques Picasso used to create his ink and charcoal drawing, _Standing Woman_ (1912).

Data about The Met collection, including over 492,000 images of public-domain artworks, available for free and unrestricted use.

The Met collection has more than 1.5 million works of art spanning 5,000 years of culture around the globe. How do these objects make it to The Met?

(New York, November 10, 2004)—In what Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Philippe de Montebello described as "one of the great single acquisitions of the last half century," the Museum announced today the purchase of a rare and uniquely important early Renaissance masterpiece by the 14th-century Italian painter Duccio di Buoninsegna (active by 1278; died 1319). The painting, in tempera and gold on wood, shows the Madonna and Child behind a parapet. The work—the last known Duccio still in private hands—is known as the Stroganoff Madonna, after its first recorded owner, Count Grigorii Stroganoff, who died in Rome in 1910.

The first major survey of these magically precise, one-of-a-kind photographic images on silver-plated sheets of copper.