Ancient Iran, historically known as Persia, was the dominant nation of western Asia for over a millennium (about 550 BC–AD 650), with three native dynasties controlling an empire of unprecedented size ...

Renaissance artists transformed the course of western art history by making the nude central to their art. Drawing inspiration from classical sculpture and the study of the live model, these artists ...

For nearly 3,000 years a series of kingdoms flourished in ancient Nubia (present-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan). The region was rich in sought-after resources such as gold and ivory and its ...

Among their rigorous preparations for eternity, ancient Egyptians developed an intricate set of religious writings to help the deceased achieve a blessed afterlife in union with the solar god Re and ...

Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems met in Harlem in 1976 when both were twenty-three years old. For more than 45 years, the two photographers have maintained a friendship and artistic dialogue that ...

Paolo Veneziano led the premier painter’s workshop in late medieval Venice, producing work ranging from large complex altarpieces to small paintings intended for personal devotion. This focused ...

Blue paper has been a popular artist material since the fifteenth century. Crafted from blue rags formed into sheets, this humble material that required expert knowledge to produce and had a profound ...

While excavating an ancient Greek settlement in Babunjë, a region of Albania once populated by Greek colonists, archaeologists discovered this extraordinary bronze statuette of an equestrian. Found in ...

In the early 1620s Peter Paul Rubens designed a series of monumental tapestries, The Triumph of the Eucharist, for the governor-general of the Netherlands, the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia. This ...

Chinese and Japanese imports were wildly popular in Europe in the 1600s and 1700s. Every fashionable home was furnished with porcelain, lacquer, silk, and other materials previously little known in ...

Violence was considered a necessary part of life in the Middle Ages (about 500–1500 A.D.). People were surrounded by violence in many forms, including wars, brutal tournaments, and deadly rivalries ...

In a peripatetic career that spanned five decades, the photographer Felice Beato (1832–1909) covered a wide swath of East Asia. Following in the wake of Britain's vast colonial empire, he was among ...