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.”

Throughout the ages, public sculptures have served as didactic tools, offering moral, patriotic, and cultural instruction. Symbols of pride, they have proclaimed cities as tastemakers in civic and aesthetic matters.

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.

Domestic display is a good example of the conspicuous consumption of the Roman elite, proving that they had wealth and therefore power and authority.

The conquest of Egypt and its incorporation into the Roman empire inaugurated a new fascination with its ancient culture.

Although ancient literary references inform us of Roman paintings on wood, ivory, and other materials, works that have survived are in the durable medium of fresco that was used to adorn the interiors of private homes in Roman cities and in the countryside.

Sarcophagi had been used for centuries by the Etruscans and the Greeks; when the Romans eventually adopted inhumation as their primary funerary practice, both of these cultures had an impact on the development of Roman sarcophagi.

Although many Roman sculptures are purely Roman in their conception, others are carefully measured, exact copies of Greek statues, or variants of Greek prototypes adapted to the taste of the Roman patron.

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?