Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 with its mission to bring art and art education to the American people. The museum's permanent collection consists of works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt, paintings, and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes, and accessories, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries.The Fifth Avenue building opened on February 20, 1872, at 681 Fifth Avenue. In 2021, despite the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, the museum attracted 1,958,000 visitors, ranking fourth on the list of most-visited art museums in the world. The Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, Byzantine, and Islamic art.mw-parser-output .mw-parser-output .mw-parser-output .mw-parser-output .mw-parser-output .
Georges M & eacute;li & egrave;s made six films using aquariums as a special effects device in his early career, producing actualit & eacute;s (news reports), f & eacute;eries (fairy plays), and science fiction films about the underwater world. These films emerged within a broader constellation of media that achieved underwater points of view in fin de si & egrave;cle culture, including diving suits, imaginative drawings, and, above all, aquariums. Often constructed at world's fairs, aquariums were spectacular sites that propagandized a wider infrastructural revolution in which water and other aspects of the natural world were increasingly controlled by modern technologies in Paris, overseas colonies, and even the deep sea. This article explores how the ecological and imperial resonances of aquariums, grottoes, and urban infrastructures manifest in the technologies and narratives of M & eacute;li & egrave;s's underwater films.
Excavations of the historical burial ground of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia yielded approximately 400 individual burials, the majority of coffins from which were severely degraded. Documentation of coffin construction in colonial and post-colonial America is scarce. One adult coffin from the site, preserved in remarkable condition, was selected for detailed examination to address this gap. Careful disassembly, as part of a structural conservation treatment, facilitated the study of carpentry techniques employed in the coffin's design, as well as the recording of comprehensive measurements of its dimensions. One key carpentry technique, kerf bending, found in multiple locations across the coffin, represents ingenuity on the part of its maker and may be a feature of eighteenth-century American coffin design more common than previously thought.
This study presents a comparative technical analysis of Portrait of a 39-Year-Old Woman (The Nivaagaard Collection, Denmark) and Portrait of a Man (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA), two oval-format paintings by Rembrandt that were previously proposed as pendants. The paintings were examined and analyzed non-invasively focusing on materials, technique and condition. While both paintings have similar supports and pigments consistent with 17th-century practice, differences were identified in the application of vermilion and the use of smalt, and in the signatures and inscriptions. The woman’s portrait has undergone alterations and additions, while the man’s portrait has remained in an unaltered condition. This research contributes new comparative data on Rembrandt paintings from the early 1630s and highlights the value of technical examination in assessing early 17th-century Dutch portraits.
The digitization of museum collections has produced vast multimodal data, yet existing automated classification methods treat classification attributes as independent flat categories and overlook the hierarchical taxonomic structures embedded in museum cataloging systems, frequently yielding predictions that are taxonomically illegitimate. We present a multimodal hierarchical learning framework for multi-attribute museum artifact classification that combines vision-semantic alignment with hierarchical consistency constraints. The framework extracts visual and textual features through a ViT and BERT dual-encoder, aligns the two modalities in a shared space via a contrastive objective trained on cultural-heritage data, adaptively fuses them through a gating mechanism, and performs joint hierarchical prediction across multiple taxonomy trees using cascaded conditional classification heads. The core contribution is a hierarchical consistency loss that explicitly penalizes incompatible prediction distributions between adjacent levels during training, complemented by a constrained decoding strategy that guarantees the structural legitimacy of output paths at inference. On the Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access dataset, the framework achieves an average hierarchical F1 of 85.2%, a gain of 6.9 percentage points over the strongest multimodal baseline, and reduces the model’s learned hierarchical violation rate to 2.8%, with constrained decoding eliminating the remaining violations at inference. On the SILKNOW silk textile corpus, ten epochs of fine-tuning surpass the reported baselines under the evaluated transfer setting. Ablations and visualization analyses further clarify the contribution of each component and the model’s internal decision-making behavior.
