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museum exhibitions schedule Apr 25, 2025 visibility 5 link 2 artists, 1 gallery

The Walters Art Museum Shines a Light On the Toxic History of Medieval Manuscripts

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has opened "If Books Could Kill," an exhibition exploring the toxic history of medieval manuscripts. The show reveals how pigments like white lead, red mercury, and arsenic were commonly used by scribes, artists, and bookbinders, exposing them to serious health risks. Co-curated by Dr. Lynley Anne Herbert and Dr. Annette S. Ortiz Miranda, the exhibition features 24 rarely displayed manuscripts from the museum's collection, including a Thai treatise on elephants with arsenic-based yellows and a 15th-century Armenian Gospel with vermillion pigments. It also includes a conservator-led video demonstrating how portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) is used to identify toxic materials.

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cats medieval manuscripts walters art museum 2732418

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has opened an exhibition titled "Paws on Parchment," exploring the depiction of cats in medieval manuscripts from Europe, Asia, and the Islamic world. The show was inspired by a 15th-century Flemish manuscript that still bears the inky paw prints of a cat that walked across the pages while they were drying. Curator Lynley Anne Herbert assembled the exhibition after discovering the manuscript in the museum's collection, researching medieval poetry, bestiaries, and encyclopedic works to understand historical attitudes toward cats. The exhibition runs through February 22, 2026, and is the first of three shows dedicated to animals in art.