The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website—metmeseum.org—now hosts a free, educational virtual archive dedicated to over 8,000 works of art that span global history. This collection offers a chronology of artworks based on region of origin and era as well as essays and a digital gallery of the entire collection with drop-down filters.

Left to right: Plaque: Warrior and Attendants, Edo ; The Beeches, Asher Brown Durand ; Jar, Japan

The site invites viewers to explore: “Discover the story of art and global culture through The Met collection.” It’s great for perusing and combing through the extensive information on various points of art history or researching a specific period or region.

Here are some essays from the archive that I found interesting:

The Aesthetic of the Sketch in Nineteenth-Century France

Ceramic Technology in the Seljuq Period: Stonepaste in Syria and Iran in the Eleventh Century

Astronomy and Astrology in the Medieval Islamic World

African Influences in Modern Art

Art of the First Cities in the Third Millennium B.C.

Portraits of African Leadership