Museum News

Discover the wealth, power and enduring legacy of Ancient Persia.

With unprecedented loans from the National Museum of Iran, the Persepolis Museum and the Louvre, and a season of special events including films, music, guest lectures and workshops.

Exhibition dates 9 September 2005 – 8 January 2006

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York:

Effective July 1, 2005, the Photograph and Slide Library of The MMA will no longer be open to the general public. The Library will be undergoing a major initiative that will eventually make its images available digitally to the broader educational community. All requests to publish images from the Museum's collections should still be submitted in writing to the Library. The Library will no longer be open for walk-ins; appointments should be made in advance by calling the Library's main line at 212-650-2261 and are available Tuesdays - Fridays, 10:00 am - 4:30 pm. As usual the Library will be closed during the months of July and August.

New Acquisition: Duccio's Madonna and Child: The early Renaissance masterpiece Madonna and Child by the fourteenth-century Italian painter Duccio di Buoninsegna, just acquired by the Metropolitan Museum, is now on display in its new home in the European Paintings Galleries. The work will be on view to the public through March 13, 2005, after which it will be removed temporarily from the galleries for further study and conservation.

Madonna and Child, ca. 1300. Duccio di Buoninsegna (Italian, Sienese, active by 1278, died 1318). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Rogers Fund, Walter and Leonore Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation Gift, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, Annette de la Renta Gift, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, Louis V. Bell, and Dodge Funds, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, several members of The Chairman's Council Gifts, Elaine L. Rosenberg and Stephenson Family Foundation Gifts, 2003 Benefit Fund, and other gifts and funds from various donors, 2004 (2004.442).

Metropolitan Museum Acquires World-Renowned Collection of Photographs from The Howard Gilman Foundation:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Howard Gilman Foundation announced jointly on March 16, 2005 that the Museum has acquired the Gilman Paper Company Collection, widely regarded as the world's finest collection of photographs in private hands. With exceptional examples of 19th-century French, British, and American photographs, as well as masterpieces from the turn-of-the-century and modernist periods, the Gilman Collection has played a central role in establishing photography's historical canon and has long set the standard for connoisseurship in the field. In addition to many unique and beautiful icons of photography by such masters as Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Nadar, Gustave Le Gray, Mathew Brady, Carleton Watkins, Edward Steichen, and Man Ray, the Gilman Collection includes extensive bodies of work by numerous pioneers of the camera. The collection was acquired through purchase, complemented by a generous gift from the Foundation. It contains more than 8,500 photographs, dating primarily from the first century of the medium, 1839–1939.

Une œuvre remarquable vient d'entrer dans les collections du département des Antiquités grecques, étrusques et romaines, après son achat en vente publique à l'hôtel Drouot le 7 octobre 2004. Cette tête de cheval de grandeur nature est un fragment d'une sculpture archaïque grecque de la fin du VIe siècle avant J.-C. : elle doit appartenir à un groupe équestre ou à une œuvre isolée représentant un cheval non monté plutôt qu'à un attelage, plus rare encore dans l'art grec de ce temps. L'offrande peut avoir été dédiée dans un sanctuaire - l'acropole d'Athènes a livré la série la mieux documentée, mais des découvertes faites à Délos et à Eleusis ou dans d'autres sanctuaires attiques attestent de cet usage - ou bien provenir d'un de ses enclos funéraires aristocratiques de la campagne athénienne.