National Gallery of Art in the context of "Art museum"

An alliance is a relationship among people, groups, or states that have joined together for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not an explicit agreement has been worked out among them. Members of an alliance are called allies. Alliances form in many settings, including political alliances, military alliances, and business alliances.

Pierre-Eugène-Émile Hébert (October 12 or 20, 1823 – 1893) was a French sculptor. As the son of sculptor Pierre Hébert, he studied with his father and Jean-Jacques Feuchère (1807–1852). Émile Hébert participated in the Salon de Paris and the Exposition Universelle (1855), creating the allegorical statues La Comédie and Le Drame for the vaudeville theatre in Paris. He was awarded a Second Class Medal in 1872. Émile Hébert was one of the few sculptors to collaborate with the renowned bronze fondeur Georges Servant, resulting in pieces in the Neo-Grecian and Egyptian Revival styles.

An art museum or art gallery is a building or space for the display of art, usually from the museum's own collection. It might be in public or private ownership, be accessible to all, or have restrictions in place. Although primarily concerned with visual art, art museums are often used as a venue for other cultural exchanges and artistic activities, such as lectures, jewelry, performance arts, music concerts, or poetry readings. Art museums also frequently host themed temporary exhibitions, which often include items on loan from other collections.

A tondo (pl.: tondi or tondos) is a Renaissance term for a circular work of art, either a painting or a sculpture. The word derives from the Italian rotondo, "round". The term is usually not used in English for small round paintings, but only those over about 60 cm (two feet) in diameter, thus excluding many round portrait miniatures – for sculpture the threshold is rather lower.

A circular or oval relief sculpture is also called a roundel. The infrequently-encountered synonym rondo usually refers to the musical form.

Self-portraits are portraits artists make of themselves. Although self-portraits have been made since the earliest times, it is not until the mid-15th century that artists can be frequently identified depicting themselves, as either the main subject or important characters in their work. With better and cheaper mirrors, and the advent of the panel portrait, many painters, sculptors and printmakers tried some form of self-portraiture. Portrait of a Man in a Turban by Jan van Eyck of 1433 may well be the earliest known panel self-portrait. He painted a separate portrait of his wife, and he belonged to the social group that had begun to commission portraits, already more common among wealthy Netherlanders than south of the Alps. The genre is venerable, but not until the Renaissance, with increased wealth and interest in the individual as a subject, did it become truly popular.

By the Baroque period, most artists with an established reputation at least left drawings of themselves. Printed portraits of artists had a market, and many were self-portraits. They were also sometimes given as gifts to family and friends. If nothing else, they avoided the need to arrange for a model, and for the many professional portrait-painters, a self-portrait kept in the studio acted as a demonstration of the artist's skill for potential new clients. The unprecedented number of self-portraits by Rembrandt, both as paintings and prints, made clear the potential of the form, and must have further encouraged the trend.

Renaissance music is traditionally understood to cover European music of the 15th and 16th centuries, later than the Renaissance era as it is understood in other disciplines. Rather than starting from the early 14th-century ars nova, the Trecento music was treated by musicology as a coda to medieval music and the new era dated from the rise of triadic harmony and the spread of the contenance angloise style from the British Isles to the Burgundian School. A convenient watershed for its end is the adoption of basso continuo at the beginning of the Baroque period.

The period may be roughly subdivided, with an early period corresponding to the career of Guillaume Du Fay (c. 1397–1474) and the cultivation of cantilena style, a middle dominated by Franco-Flemish School and the four-part textures favored by Johannes Ockeghem (1410s or '20s–1497) and Josquin des Prez (late 1450s–1521), and culminating during the Counter-Reformation in the florid counterpoint of Palestrina (c. 1525–1594) and the Roman School.

Nelumbo nucifera, also known as Padma (Sanskrit: पद्म, romanized: Padmā, lit. 'Lotus') or Kamala (Sanskrit: कमल, lit. 'Lotus'), sacred lotus, pink lotus, Indian lotus, or simply lotus, is one of two extant species of aquatic plant in the family Nelumbonaceae. It is sometimes colloquially called a water lily, though this more often refers to members of the family Nymphaeaceae. The lotus belongs in the order Proteales.

Lotus plants are adapted to grow in the flood plains of slow-moving rivers and delta areas. Stands of lotus drop hundreds of thousands of seeds every year to the bottom of the pond. While some sprout immediately and most are eaten by wildlife, the remaining seeds can remain dormant for an extensive period of time as the pond silts in and dries out. During flood conditions, sediments containing these seeds are broken open, and the dormant seeds rehydrate and begin a new lotus colony. It is cultivated in nutrient-rich, loamy, and often flooded soils, requiring warm temperatures and specific planting depths, with propagation via rhizomes, seeds, or tissue culture, and is harvested by hand or machine for stolons, flowers, seeds, and rhizomes over several months depending on climate and variety.

Ginevra de' Benci is a portrait painting by Leonardo da Vinci of the 15th-century Florentine aristocrat Ginevra de' Benci (born c. 1458). It was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. US from Franz Joseph II, Prince of Liechtenstein in February 1967 for a record price for a painting of between $5 and $6 million. It is the only painting by Leonardo on public view in the Americas.

Sébastien Bourdon (French pronunciation: [sebastjɛ̃ buʁdɔ̃]; 2 February 1616 – 8 May 1671) was a French painter and engraver. His chef d'œuvre is The Crucifixion of St. Peter made for the cathedral of Notre Dame.