Research Guide: Art History

Book and e-book collections relating mainly to paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints from the fourth to the mid-twentieth centuries by European and American artists. The decorative arts are a secondary area of collecting. Within these subjects the collections focus on, to name a few related to this site: Attributions, Auction Sales, Collecting, Provenance, Exhibitions, and Collectors.

Auction catalogs make up more than 90,000 volumes in our collection. The catalogs represent 1,000 auction houses in Europe, Australia, and the Americas, ranging in date from the eighteenth century to the present.

Database of 14,000 volumes of Federico Zeri's collection of auction catalogues linked with the data and materials of the photo library at the Università di Bologna.

The Heidelberg University Library owns well over ten thousand auction catalogs from various German and international auction houses.

As part of the project “Art – Auctions – Provenances. The German art trade as reflected in the auction catalogs of the years 1901 to 1929”, the auction catalogs published in Germany, Austria and Switzerland between 1901 and 1929 were identified, bibliographically recorded and, on this basis, quantitatively determined, digitized and made accessible online. Includes full text options.