It hardly occurs to us that most of our modern ball games could not be played without one essential ingredient, rubber, the origin of which can be traced to pre-Hispanic Mexic

For those trapped inside the canons of classical Greek sculpture, the large hollow ceramic figures from Nayarit in West Mexico (figs 1–3) may seem ‘elephantine’,1For use of the adjective ‘elephantine’ in this…

The collection of antiquities from Egypt in the National Gallery of Victoria offers the opportunity for Victorians interested in the culture of ancient Egypt to gain an introduction to many of its…

The National Gallery of Victoria recently acquired its most important example of early Indian sculpture, a freestanding male figure produced at Mathura in north India during the Kushān period, 1st to 3rd…

Just prior to his death, the British Victorian watercolourist and traveller, turned Royal Academician, John Frederick Lewis (1805–76) stipulated in his will that his remaining works, apart from a bequest to his…

In keeping with Dr Ursula Hoff’s own practice and with the meticulous training she has urged upon her students, this short article offers thoughts arising from an examination of a single artefactR

The first Lajamanu paintings have an explosive vigour rarely encountered in the field of Aboriginal art

The recent acquisition of Sebastiaen Vrancx’s Crossing of the Red Sea (fi

The Birds in a winter landscape (fig. 1), acquired by the Felton Bequest in 1990, is among the major works of Lu Ji (c. 1440–

The study of the minor Flemish masters of the end of the 15th century has progressed considerably in recent years

The earliest, and certainly one of the most intriguing, nineteenth-century Australian photographs in the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection is a daguerreotype of three Victorian Aborigines taken by Dougla

The mid-nineteenth-century English artists known as the Pre-Raphaelites are represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria by a group of important paintings and works on paper.

   The Royal Exhibition Buildings, Carlton, stand today as a monument to ‘Marvellous Melbour

A knowledge of picture frames can prove invaluable to an art historian seeking to date a painting or to confirm aspects of its provenance

After a century of civil wars, the Tokugawa shoguns (military rulers) of the Edo period (1615–1868) unified Japan and brought about more than 250 years of peace and prospe