In 79 AD Mount Vesuvius, just north of Naples, erupted with devastating effects on the towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Boscoreale, which had been built on Vesuvius's slopes as vacation…
About the MFA The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, founded in 1870, opened to the public in 1876 at Copley Square. It moved to its present neoclassical home on…
About the National Gallery Unlike the Louvre and the Prado, whose earliest holdings came from royalty, the National Gallery evolved from a collection of 38 paintings purchased by the British…
About the Uffizi The Uffizi Gallery in Florence is housed in a huge complex whose core was commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici from Giorgio Vasari. Vasari (who is today…
The Getty Museum opened Pacific Palisades in 1974. In 1982, with a bequest of $1.2 billion from Getty's will, it became the richest museum in the world. The collection of…
The Fogg Museum at Harvard University opened in 1895 in a Renaissance-style building designed by Richard Morris Hunt, whose Metropolitan Museum Wing D (facing Fifth Avenue) was completed within the…
The Art Institute of Chicago was established in 1879, as the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Since 1893, its home has been a Beaux Arts building facing Michigan Drive that…
The core of the Prado's holdings came from the collection of the Spanish monarchs, whose taste ran to royal portraits and religious subjects, and whose money could buy the best…
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a few blocks from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Isabella Stewart (b. 1840), daughter of a wealthy New York merchant, grew up in Manhattan…
On my one and only, very brief visit to Rome, I didn't have time to visit the Borghese. Here's why I mind. Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577-1633) and the Borghese Collection…