Research Guide: Art History

[Internet Archive Mirror Site]

Supported by the EC-SOCRATES project ArcheoNet (1997-1998)
and the EC-INCO project ArchTerra (1999-2000)

Bill Thayer's website, with Latin texts online, including Macrobius' Saturnalia and The Natural History of Pliny the Elder

From Project Gutenberg

From bibliotheca Augustana

Latin, and English versions From Bill Thayer's Web site

English translation by Arthur Fairbanks, 1931.

English translation by C. D. Yonge.

Complete Latin text

Maps and images of the archaeological remains of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, Oplontis and Boscoreale.

Site in Italian and English, from the Soprintendenza Archaeologica di Napoli e Pompei.

Internet discussion group and 'crossroads' for Web resources on the art and archaeology of Italy and the Roman provinces, ca. 1000 BC - AD 700 from the Interdept. Program in Classical Art and Archaeology (IPCAA) at the University of Michigan, with mirror sites provided by the University of East Anglia and the University of Sydney.

The Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture known to the Renaissance is available on a computerised database of some 25,000 images and 40,000 documents, with accompanying videodisks, and can also be consulted from the photographs in the subject files of the Collection. When established in 1947 by Phyllis Pray Bober, the project was intended to document the knowledge of classical works of art up to the time of the Sack of Rome (1527); in recent years, in collaboration with the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and with the support of the Getty Art History Information Program, its scope has been expanded both chronologically (up to 1600) and to include architecture.

Image database and resources on classical art, its collection and reception.

The fortune of antique sculpture in printed repertories. From Cribecu online (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)

From the University of Oklahoma.

Descriptions, maps and images from the UNESCO website.

History, description and images.

Includes links

Internet resources to Byzantium compiled by the University of Fordham provides a large selections of sources on Byzantine history and culture as well as an extensive section of links.

Databases from the Sussex Centre for Byzantine Cultural History

Website of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Internet Archive mirror site.
Guide to internet sources on Byzantine icons, frescoes and mosaics.

A database of images, texts, charts and historical maps, Mapping Gothic France explores the parallel stories of Gothic architecture and the formation of France in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Federico Zeri's digitised photographic collection of Italian art.

Searchable database of the Archivio di Stato di Roma including digital images of the original documents.

3-D walk-through interactive model of Piero della Francesca's fresco cycle.

A project aimed at deepening our understanding of Leonardo da Vinci through a series of international exhibitions, scientific research and educational resources.

The Web Gallery of Art is a searchable database of European fine arts and architecture (8th-19th centuries), currently containing over 42.400 reproductions, with an emphasis on Renaissance Art.

Bernard Berenson’s Drawings of the Florentine Painters is a digital resource based on Berenson’s publication of the same name. This research tool allows you to search for any of the drawings listed in the three editions (1903, 1938 in English; 1961, in Italian). Filters allow you to search Berenson’s information by artist, title (in English or Italian), location, and technique. Each entry includes key information from all three editions of Berenson’s text, as well as the current location, an image of the catalog page, and plates included in 1903; most entries also have links to museum webpages, including images.

Mini virtual exhibitions on a variety of themes, drawn from a range of French national museums.

Searchable image database of 900 works illustrating the intersections between art and history, from the period 1789-1939.

Digital library of Dutch literature.

The Rembrandt Documents Project (RemDoc) hosted by the Radboud University Nijmegen with the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam, provides a database for all original documents and primary source texts relating to Rembrandt.

The database can be considered as the third, updated and digitized, edition of the major reference publication on Ealry Netherlandish Painting, written by Max J. Friedländer. The Friedländer 3.0 database includes all the records from the second, English edition, published in 1967-1976. Published by Centre for the Study of the Flemish Primitives

The art world in Britain 1660 to 1735 publishes primary sources and research tools for the study of the arts in Britain between the restoration of Charles II and the opening of Hogarth's St Martin's Lane Academy.

Digital imaging project by Mary Ann Sullivan, Bluffton University.

A searchable database of British wall paintings.

A complete online record of all the surviving Romanesque sculpture in Britain and Ireland, at more than 5000 sites.

Resources on Lucas Cranach the Elder.

from Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Database of Danish Wall Paintings from the National Museum of Denmark [archived by Internet Archive]

Open University MOOC course

Online database of European Prehistoric art, funded by the European Union.

Web portal. Includes ABZU: Abzu is a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world.

Dedicated to Mediterranean heritage.

Photographs of Roman Syria

Image database based at the University of Oxford: "images of archaeological sites, with buildings and art,cover the areas of the former Roman empire which later came under Islamic rule, such as Syro-Palestine/the Levant, Arabia, Egypt, North Africa and Spain, from the time of Alexander the Great (i.e., from about 300 BC) through the Islamic period to the present."

Extensive resource from the Smithsonian

Database of French furniture and architectural heritage, including furniture and religious, domestic, scientific and industrial objects. Includes approximately 260,000 records, including 150,000 illustrations.

The Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA) is the international research project dedicated to recording medieval stained glass.

The Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA) is the international research project dedicated to recording medieval stained glass.

Magazine dedicated to medieval stained glass.

Site by Anita Kovacevic that investigates Renaissance Italian maiolica as a material culture study by using methodological models in order to discover the role of maiolica within Renaissance society, culture and ritual. The gender implications, and religious and superstitious iconography of these objects are also considered, as related to the artistic ideals and values of the Renaissance.

Database of images from Stoke-On-Trent museums of ceramics, decorative arts, fine art, local history and natural history

Database of over 4000 images of costume from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century.

A film about the reconstruction of the hat worn by a Fugger head accountant in 1530, based on research by Dr Ulinka Rublack, Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge and dress historian Jenny Tiramani.

Encyclopaedia, forum and image archive on antique jewellery.

This database holds the largest collection of inventories gathered from artisanal groups in early modern Europe, focusing on Italy (Florence, Siena, and Venice) and Denmark (Elsinore) from 1550-1650. Over the course of the project (2017-2022), over 700 inventories were collected and transcribed, generating a total of 92,000 entries, all of which are accessible in the Refashioning the Renaissance database. Dress, textiles, arms, jewellery, trimmings, and fashion accessories are some of the many items recorded. In the category of clothing, for instance, the data comprises an extensive array of garments, including (but certainly not limited to) aprons, bodices, cassocks, petticoats, shirts, sleeves, cloaks, breeches, jerkins, and stockings.

This site presents rings from the Middle Ages and Renaissance offered for sale by Les Enluminures on an ongoing basis. Rings are organized chronologically from c. 300 to c. 1650 A.D. in four categories: Early Christian and Byzantine, Early Medieval, Gothic, and Renaissance and Baroque.

Online gallery guides and resources.

Links to organisations worldwide concerned with the restitution of artworks and other objects lost during the Holocaust.

Fine Art Auctioneers and Valuers

The databases contain indexed transcriptions of material from auction catalogs and archival inventories of western European works of art, and contain nearly 1,000,000 records that cover the period from the late 16th century to the early 20th century.

Online exhibition by Joe L. Dolice.

Information on art forgery and famous art forgers.

The Giorgio Vasari Project aims primarily to act as an open access and collaborative (participative) repository of references, sources and resources; a starting point of research for art history and renaissance studies.

Its main scope lays into collecting, for further research and reference, all literature on Vasari - the painter, the architect, the writer, the historical and political figure - and his work.

Cennino D' Andrea Cennini. The Craftsman's Handbook. The Italian "Il Libro dell' Arte." Translated by Daniel V. Thompson, Jr. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1933, by Yale University Press.

The project Leonardo da Vinci and his Treatise on Painting documents the legacy of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) on the science of art. It concentrates on the Treatise on Painting, a disorganized, fragmented, and misleading text that was compiled by Francesco Melzi, one of Leonardo's pupils, around 1540 but that was regarded as a Leonardo original for centuries.

The platform hosts the critical edition of the letters written to Jacob Burckhardt, reconstructing in open access one of the most important European correspondences of the 19th century.

Text from Project Gutenberg

Glasgow University

Translated from the German: With Notes By Charles Lock Eastlake, RA., F.R.S.

Primary source texts, including Michelangelo Biondo, Della Nobilissima Pittura, 1549, Benedetto Varchi, Lezzione della maggioranza delle arti, 1549, Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (Searchable text of the 1550 and 1568 editions), Lodovico Dolce, Libri tre ... delle diverse sorti delle Gemme, 1565, Giovan Paolo Lomazzo, Della forma delle Muse, cavata da gli antichi autori Greci et Latini, 1591, Giovanni Battista Armenini, De' veri precetti della pittura di M. Gio. Battista Armenini, Federico Zuccari Il passaggio per Italia, con la dimora di Parma

Cross-cultural Studies in Art History Sources

Digital Repository for Art History at the University of Heidelberg.

Open access network for people working in the humanities.

A database of Islamic arts of the book