Likely used for serving broth to a woman at her dressing table, this bowl is elaborately decorated with vignettes of fish intended to allude to its co...

Depicted in a posture associated with meditation, this figure's hair is partially shaved off, he has long earlobes, and he holds a rolled scroll in on...

Does this double serpent-tailed siren look familiar? Imgur photo from Reddit. If you are a coffee drinker, visions of a green mermaid-esque ...

Touching the edge of the perfectly balanced basket on her head, an alluring woman in the prime of her youth is depicted bringing offerings to the dece...

Featuring a miniature interpretation of an architectural ornament from ancient Rome, this Chinese porcelain ewer was destined to become a courtly obje...

This slit gong depicts the face and voice of one of the founding ancestors of the village where it was made. "The ancestors watch over human activitie...

Jacopo Bassano was eighty years old when he started this paining, and he died before it was completed. "I think his age liberated him and that he was ...

In this drawing, based on Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" fresco, Rembrandt first drew Christ as a much younger man. Later, he changed his mind, and...

Cylinder seals were carved in reverse to create a raised impression; their whole imagery was only revealed when rolled out onto a clay surface. The sc...

The two scenes on this ivory plaque are set in the days after Christ's Resurrection from the tomb during the period before the Ascension. "The power t...

Curator Alison Manges Nogueira admits that she has a clearer understanding of Bellini's Madonna and Child since becoming a mother herself. "I can see ...

On Monday Christopher Noey, General Manager of Media Production, Senior producer, discussed 82nd & Fifth during a Google Art Project Art Talk Hangout....

Curator Dirk Breiding came across a surprising Hebrew inscription on this fifteenth-century German crossbow. Intrigued by its translation, he began to...

Roger Fenton has pushed the horizon line down to the bottom of this photograph, thus creating a "dreamlike sea of sky with waves of clouds going into ...

When this coronation image of Tutankhamun was made, the newly minted ruler was only six years old. "We see only the face of a sweet, innocent, young b...

Museums are increasingly trying to incorporate technology in their physical space in order to enhance visitors' experience. In this interview, Don Undeen, Manager of the Media Lab at The Metropolitan Museum of Art talks to us about: the goals and the challenges of using technology.

Presented to Edward Dean Adams--who in the 1890s rescued the American cotton oil industry--this vase was meant to look like a cotton plant, complete w...

Twelve feet long and five feet wide, this shawl would have been an important accessory for a fashionable woman in the nineteenth century. Describing i...

The weight of this two-thousand-pound solid marble statue rests on the figure's slim ankles. In addition to this great technical achievement, "His pow...

In this album, a teenage Daniel Rochford collected private musings, photographs, illustrations, and handwritten notes related to the girls he's most i...

Curator Keith Christiansen argues that Berlinghiero's depiction of the Madonna in this work is magical--unlike any other--because her expression is "f...

What is the real pull factor?

Attached to every administrative document, this tughra, or signature, of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, is very hard to read, admits curator Deniz B...

This statue of Eros, the Greek god of love, was likely dedicated at a sanctuary, in honor of the gods. "It's so quiet that you don't think of it as so...

El Greco's View of Toledo is the first picture that attracted curator George Goldner to art when he was just ten years old. "To me the works of art th...