No doubt many readers have seen images on Facebook of clever people in quarantine posing with common household objects to recreate well-known masterpieces from the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Getty Museum in California. Posted on Getty's blog The Iris on March 30, 2020, this article explains the genesis of all those images. The trend began with a challenge from the...

Gift of the Indus: The Arts and Culture of Pakistan, presented by ARTSEDGE, the Kennedy Center's arts education network, introduces the arts and culture of Pakistan to young people and teenagers in the US, Pakistan, and all over the world, in the hope of fostering greater understanding. The site has three broad sections: The Nation, with information about the people and the land; Culture & Daily...

Throughout history, illustrators and others have seen fit to accurately skewer politicians, religious leaders, and countless others through their creative drawings and words. Born in 1756, English illustrator James Gillray was part of this honorable tradition. He reigned supreme during a period that became known as the "golden age of English caricature," and he "chronicled and ridiculed the...

GIFs (Graphical Interchange Format) are a great way to add some character and sass to an email, website, or blog post. Giphy allows anyone to easily make their own custom GIFs using either a link to an online video or by uploading their own media. Next, users can select the portion and duration of the video they would like to use in the GIF, then select a font and color in order to write a...

This website accompaniment to the exhibition Girodet: Romantic Rebel, currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, features about 20 paintings and drawings by Girodet. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy- Trioson (1767–1824) was trained in the workshop of Jacques-Louis David, who is considered the leading painter of the French Revolution (last mentioned in the February 18, 2005 Scout Report...

With an interest in developing a global consortium of arts organizations, a number of institutions, including Cornell University and Columbia University, came together “to create easily accessible, multimedia, and multilingual information resources for the study and preservation of the performing arts.” Perhaps their biggest accomplishment thus far is the Global Performing Arts Database (GloPAD),...

The J. Paul Getty Museum offers an informative and learned treatment of the use of mythological images in European art, including the God of War, Mars. Readers may like to begin with the introduction on the landing page, which describes the curriculum. From there, they may like to explore the Lesson Plans, each of which focuses on an ancient object housed at the Getty, such as the 2nd Century...

Many famous works of European art highlight symbolic figures and images that reference mythology, biblical figures, or works of literature. Gods, Saints, and Heroes is an interactive guide that allows visitors to learn about such artistic symbolism. Created by Hannah Schockmel, a graduate student in Archeology and Art History at the University of Maryland, this website contains a number of...

Even as many museums around the world reopen with adaptations for the COVID-19 pandemic, not everyone is able or willing to visit in person. That makes this overview of New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, provided by Google Arts & Culture (previously featured in the 07-19-2019 Scout Report), extra handy for armchair travelers. Visitors can view more than 200 artworks inside the museum by...

New Delhi, India is home to the National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum, colloquially referred to as the Crafts Museum. As this Google Arts and Culture page dedicated to the Crafts Museum notes, "Unlike most museums, which display dead or old or rare objects, this is a museum of living crafts, of skills and objects still in common use." This virtual exhibit allows visitors to explore the Craft...