Located on the campus of William & Mary, the Muscarelle Museum of Art serves to promote the visual arts in the Williamsburg community. In recent years, the Muscarelle Museum of Art has held exhibitions such as "Botticelli and the Search for the Divine: Florentine Painting between the Medici and the Bonfire of the Vanities", "Leonardo da Vinci and the Idea of Beauty", and "Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane". These exhibitions, and others like it, have earned the Muscarelle international praise as a strong University Museum.
The origins of the collection can be traced to 1732, when the third Earl of Burlington gave William & Mary a portrait of the physicist Robert Boyle. Since that time, the collection has grown to over six thousand works of art encompassing a diverse group of objects and styles and almost every material and medium.