On Sicily, a richly decorated church known as the Cappella Palatina presents a puzzling pastiche.
across-cultures
For centuries, Byzantine and then Islamic rulers governed the island of Sicily.
The visual culture of Norman Sicily
Textile or sculpture? El Anatsui purposely disregards the limiting categories imposed by Western art history.
El Anatsui, Old Man’s Cloth
Teraoka draws on Japan's brilliant history of art and kabuki theatre to creating beauty from heart-rending tragedy.
Masami Teraoka, American Kabuki
The Iberian Peninsula was a dynamic place in the fourteenth century, with artists from what is today France and Italy arriving in the area, as well as Catalan artists traveling elsewhere.
Ferrer Bassa and the murals of Pedralbes
The Sasanians were the last pre-Islamic Iranian dynasty who ruled an expansive empire stretching across western and central Asia.
Sasanian art
This vase with a charming image of a writhing octopus was made during the height of the Minoan sea trade.
Minoan Octopus vase
Textiles remained important items after the Spanish conquest in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Churches were even painted with textile murals to endow these spaces with sacredness.
Textiles in the Colonial Andes
This particular artwork perfectly embodies all the things that northern European painters were thought to do best.
Hugo van der Goes, Portinari Altarpiece
Learn more about a map from 16th-century Mexico, made by an Indigenous artist to document the town of Cholula, to be sent back to Spain.
Map of Cholula, from the relaciones geográficas
Imagine peering into a cave and seeing a monumental carved Buddha peer right back at you.
Yungang grottoes in China
A 15th-century Florentine painting tells us about the arrival of oil painting to the city, international trade, and slavery in the renaissance.
Filippino Lippi’s Madonna and Child, an early ...
The allure of Paris attracted 19th-century Latin American artists, who eagerly traveled to this artistic capital in the absence of an art school back home.
Latin American artists learning in Paris
Boghossian’s exposure to Pan-Africanist networks in Paris helped him to develop the concept of his painting Night Flight of Dread and Delight.
Pan-Africanism and Skunder Boghossian’s Night Flight of ...
Latin American geometric abstraction united international principles of modernist abstraction with local cultural traditions, and led to more participatory forms of art.
Geometric Abstraction in South America, an introduction
Andries Beeckman's landscape painting with the so-called Castle of Batavia (in what is today Jakarta, Indonesia) highlights Dutch prowess and strength during their ascension to colonial power in the seventeenth century.
Dutch colonialism and Andries Beeckman’s The Castle ...
For centuries, handwoven cloth from the Kashmir region of the Indian subcontinent has been revered for its exquisite softness and decorative surface patterns.
Cashmere shawls
Vilar's sculpture of Tlahuicole draws on the style of Neoclassicism to show the heroic Tlaxcalan warrior Tlahuicole who battled the Aztecs
Manuel Vilar, Tlahuicole
The Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Blacks in Ouro Preto is among the most famous of Black brotherhood churches founded in Brazil
Afrodescendants and Church of Our Lady of ...
Few migrants’ lives along the ancient Silk Road have been known in such detail as those of Wirkak (Shi Jun) and Wiyushi (Kang Shi)
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