How do you lay an Egyptian mummy to rest in a museum? Our curator considered a number of factors in orienting Nesmin, RISD's Egyptian mummy, in his new case in the freshly renovated gallery, but found a strange coincidence in her final decision.

A chance meeting between the wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes and Theodore Davis, an illustrator and journalist for "Harper's Weekly", in the White House conservatory produced one of the most extraordinary dinner services.

Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature.

Curatorial intern Anthony Stott explores the journey of the myths of Ovid—from text to visual medium—in three objects in the neoclassical galleries.

Luca Cambiaso used iron gall ink and a quill pen to create this drawing in about 1570. RISD professor Andrew Raftery walks us through the making of iron gall ink and a quill pen, and explains how he copied Cambiaso's drawing.

Unfinished paintings by Eastman Johnson, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt reveal new techniques that emerged in France in the second half of the 19th century.

In this series, RISD Museum curator Dominic Molon considers the importance and setting of the studio, and calls on Rhode Island artists.

A summer intern conspires with a toothy collage in the museum’s collection.

A colossal Romanesque head in the RISD collection has yet to be securely identified, but the sheen of his nose suggests that it was rubbed by many penitent hands during the course of this sculpture’s life.

This late fifteenth-century Virgin and Child was created with subtlety, flexibility, and portability in mind. These features were central to its medieval use—and its use at the RISD Museum.

This article argues that Simon the Pharisee would have been viewed as an explicitly Jewish character by sixteenth-century viewers.

This seven-foot-tall Christ would have been suspended above an altar or screen, the juxtaposition of his damaged body and calm, downward gaze reminding those below him of both his humanity and his divinity. 

Devotional representations of Saint Barbara, a Christian martyr whose legend extended across both Western and Eastern medieval worlds, flourished in fourteenth-century Europe. An examination of the Providence Saint Barbara reveals a sculptural tradition with a complex and colorful practices of medieval devotion to the cult of saints.