The audience hall in the palace in Benin City communicated to visiting ambassadors, traders, courtiers, and subjects the power and wealth of the Oba, or king.
Location City: Boston
These reliquary figures helped a nomadic society to honor their loved ones after death.
Kota reliquary (mbulu ngulu)
How to impress your courtiers: a lesson from the Kingdom of Benin
Benin Plaques
In this example of ukiyo-e, the artist represents a modern woman in the guise of Komachi, a legendary poetess.
Utagawa Kunisada I, Visiting Komachi, from the ...
Female painters were rare in sixteenth-century Italy. In self-portraits, Sofonisba made sure to appear virtuous.
Sofonisba Anguissola
Complete mayhem! The violent scenes of this remarkable handscroll meld grisly horror with morbid humor.
Night Attack on the Sanjô Palace
Well known in his own day as a silversmith, Revere is shown in casual attire, with a teapot brimming with meaning.
John Singleton Copley, Paul Revere
A beautiful sunset, but look closer. One of humanity’s most hideous acts—seen in the waves of the indifferent sea.
J. M. W. Turner, Slave Ship
“Luminism” sounds like a subject at Hogwarts, but it actually describes landscape paintings like this one.
Fitz Henry Lane, Owl’s Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine
Rosso plays fast and loose with tradition, manipulating Christ’s body and transcending High Renaissance strictures.
Rosso Fiorentino, The Dead Christ with Angels
The subject looks through opera glasses, but she herself is the object of another man’s gaze—not to mention ours.
Mary Cassatt, In the Loge
Adam and Eve have just been evicted from Paradise, and the grass was definitely greener on the other side.
Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden
Degas is off to the races, where class issues are in the foreground.
Edgar Degas, At the Races in the Countryside
Can we call a landscape painting “emo”? This brooding, melancholy canvas definitely tempts us to.
Washington Allston, Elijah in the Desert
Mary Cassatt, an artist and close friend Degas, is the subject of this painting about the act of seeing.
Edgar Degas, Visit to a Museum
This marble relief is as flat as Tuscan bread, yet its atmospheric space recedes into depth. Extraordinary.
Donatello, Madonna of the Clouds
Homer’s fisherman just wants to bring his halibut safely to his ship—but as usual, nature is ruining everything.
Winslow Homer, The Fog Warning (or Halibut ...
This bat-human hybrid preceded the comic version by over a thousand years—move over, Bruce Wayne.
Mirror Pendant in the Form of a ...
Sargent studied the work of Velázquez, and those lessons paid off in this painting of a Bostonian’s daughters.
John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward ...
This dramatic dance scene captures a moment in time on an enormous scale.