Mellon Curatorial Fellow Matt Saba discusses the Museum's recent efforts to translate its educational materials into Arabic.

The production of humanist manuscripts in Florence centered around the busy workshops of booksellers, who entrusted the decoration of their volumes to outside painters and professional illuminators.

A collection of manuscripts—twenty of them Persian, two Eastern Turkish, and two Arabic—was presented to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in March, 1913, by Mr. Alexander Smith Cochran, of Yonkers, New York. This publication provides insight into the authors of these texts and unpacks the painstakingly rendered imagery in these beautiful manuscript illustrations.

As the custom of building large temple complexes became more widespread, so did the production of images and other objects associated with ritual and worship.

Despite the escalating popularity of printed books in the sixteenth century, many of Europe’s rulers and aristocrats continued to commission books of hours for private devotion.

In response to the catastrophic destruction of Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO world heritage site, a group of major international scholars gathered to focus on the art, archaeology, and history of the beleaguered site and present their latest findings. Their papers, given at a symposium at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in May 2016, have been collected in this fascinating and important publication. They are accompanied by a moving tribute by Waleed Khaled al-Asa‘ad to his father, Khaled al-Asa‘ad, the Syrian archaeologist and head of antiquities for the ancient city of Palmyra who was brutally murdered in 2015 while defending the site. Palmyra: Mirage in the Desert, published simultaneously in English and Arabic, is the latest volume in the Metropolitan Museum symposium series. It is a major contribution to the knowledge and understanding of this multicultural desert city— located at the crossroads of the ancient world— that will help preserve the memory of this extraordinary place for generations to come.

This completely reconceived and rewritten guide to the Metropolitan Museum's encyclopedic holdings—the first new edition of the guidebook in nearly thirty years—provides the ideal introduction to almost 600 essential masterpieces from one of the world's most popular and beloved museums. It features a compelling and accessible design, beautiful color reproductions, and up-to-date descriptions written by the Museum's own experts. More than a simple souvenir book, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide provides a comprehensive view of art history spanning five millennia and the entire globe, beginning with the Ancient World and ending in contemporary times. It includes media as varied as painting, photography, costume, sculpture, decorative arts, musical instruments, arms and armor, works on paper, and many more. Presenting works ranging from the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur to Canova's Perseus with the Head of Medusa to Sargent's Madame X, this is an indispensable volume for lovers of art and art history, and for anyone who has ever dreamed of lingering over the most iconic works in the Metropolitan's unparalleled collection.