Looking for something new to add to your reading list? We’ve got you covered. Below we’ve brought together a few of our newest and most in-demand exhibition catalogues of 2026 so far, including such best sellers as Raphael: Sublime Poetry and Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship.
Met Publications from Current Exhibitions
Costume Art
Fashion transforms our bodies. Exploring this concept through the lens of age, size, gender, and disability, Costume Art demonstrates how the clothed body is central to artistic expression and representation. The luxuriously designed book features a die-cut cover, three specialty papers, debossed details, and metallic silver foils. New assemblages created specifically for this volume by artist Julie Wolfe, composed of photographs by stylist and designer Nathalie Agussol, highlight the connection between art and fashion through collage, overlay, and juxtaposition.
Learn more about this Met Museum publication here.
Musical Bodies
Musical Bodies explores the overlapping worlds and blurred boundaries between bodies and instruments across 5,000 years of art and music history. Whether we are tapping, clapping, vocalizing, or whistling, our bodies are musical instruments, and, in return, many instruments derive their form and decoration from the human body. Acting as powerful vehicles of identity, these objects complicate the notion of where bodies end and instrumental musicmaking begins. This interdisciplinary publication features some 130 musical instruments and related works of art, including paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, manuscripts, and costumes. Instruments considered range from Ancient Egyptian sistra and Renaissance figural fiddles to Tipu Sultan's mechanical organ in the shape of a tiger mauling a European soldier and the "Symbol" guitar played by Prince. The book establishes the ways bodies and instruments interact and entwine, then explores how instruments reflect identity, sex, death, and the afterlife. Drawing on musicology, organology, anthropology, art, literature, religion, pop culture, and mythology, this volume is a fascinating exploration of music, art, and the human condition.
Learn more about this Met Museum publication here.
Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy
Colonial and imperial expansion, technical advancement, and artistic transformation in the nineteenth century catalyzed the global marketplace and sparked a wave of European picture-making focused on North Africa and the Middle East. Known as Orientalism, the genre inspired by Islamic cultures relied equally on fact and fantasy to create iconic images both celebrated and interrogated today. This book tells a new, multifaceted story, taking into account how major figures ranging from the French painters Ingres, Delacroix, and Gérôme to the Ottoman statesman and artist Osman Hamdi Bey shaped an understanding of their world by incorporating Islamic motifs into their pictures. Addressing manifold questions about ethnic and racial difference, gender, power relations, and colonialist attitudes, the publication reinterprets beloved works of art such as Gérôme's Bashi-Bazouk and Ingres's La Grande Odalisque. The book reaches beyond easel painting to detail the impact of Orientalism on decorative arts, architecture, and collecting practices, which inspired a deep admiration for Islamic art and prompted a design revolution with an enduring legacy in Europe and the United States.
Learn more about this Met Museum publication here.
Met Publications from Recent Exhibitions
Raphael: Sublime Poetry
Raphael (Raffaello di Giovanni Santi; 1483–1520) is unquestionably one of the most important artists of the Italian Renaissance. Despite living only 37 years, he quickly emerged as a peer to both Leonardo and his avowed rival, Michelangelo. Raphael: Sublime Poetry spans his short but spectacular life and career, from his early training amid the culture of his native Urbino, through his prolific years in Florence, to his final, magnificent decade at the papal court in Rome. Though Raphael is best known for his meteoric success as a painter, draftsman, designer, and architect, this catalogue highlights his equal accomplishments as a humanist, antiquarian, and poet.
Learn more about this Met Museum publication here.
Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship
The Gothic era produced some of the Western world’s most imposing structures, today icons of the European cityscape. Unlike buildings from the Renaissance onward, these medieval works are rarely discussed as the products of the ingenious, innovative contributions of individual architects. This book challenges that common perception by asserting the significant impact of draftsmanship on the development of the Gothic style from the twelfth to early sixteenth century. The rediscovery of a little-known corpus of architectural drawings and prints reveals the crucial role of drawings in the development of complex and visually appealing structures—from monumental stone cathedrals to small liturgical objects. Gothic by Design includes surprising ties to contemporary concerns, showing how these works on paper functioned on and off the building site, established the basis for modern concepts of artistic identity and intellectual property, and provided evidence of the long afterlife of Gothic design strategies and their potential use today in sustainable architecture.
Learn more about this Met Museum publication here.
You can find these exhibition catalogues alongside other Met publications in-store and on our website.
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