Arts and Markets: Economic Histories of the Arts: Images & Web Resources
Production, reception and the distribution and sale of art have historically influenced the aesthetics and creation of art. This guide will focus on finding and using materials for research in the area of the economic history of art.
ArtCyclopedia allows users to search a number of museums at once and go directly to their holdings on the selected artist. A good basic starting point for beginning research on fine art.
Digital library of more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences with a suite of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes.
Site created and maintained by Mary Ann Sullivan, faculty at Bluffton University.
Note on website from Mary Ann Sullivan: "I have photographed (on site), scanned, and manipulated all the images on these pages. Please feel free to use them for personal or educational purposes. (I would appreciate being told if you find them useful.) They are not available for commercial purposes without my explicit permission."
The Visual Information Access (VIA) system is a union catalog of visual resources at Harvard, focusing on artistic and cultural materials. VIA includes catalog records for objects or images owned, held or licensed by Harvard. Access to the catalog is open to the general public: all catalog records and thumbnail images are available to everyone.
Access to higher resolution images is usually available to the Harvard community, is always determined by an individual repository, and is often dependent on copyright. Access to original object or image is determined by the individual repository. Restrictions on access may be noted in the VIA record.
The internationally recognized WorldImages database provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains almost 75,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. WorldImages is accessible anywhere and its images may be freely used for non-profit educational purposes. The images can be located using many search techniques, and for convenience they are organized into over 800 portfolios which are then organized into subject groupings.
With almost 2 million items from around the globe in its collection, the British Museum is one of the foremost museums in the world. Virtually the entire collection is accessible online through the museum's database, and the museum offers professional-grade images of many objects in their collection free of charge for academic and non-commercial use.
The National Gallery houses the British national collection of Western European painting from the 13th to the 19th centuries, including works by Titian, Vermeer, Holbein, and Michelangelo. The website contains a gallery of the entire gallery collection as well as an ongoing podcast series pertaining to significant works.
The National Gallery of Art, one of the world's preeminent museums, was created in 1937 . The Gallery's collection of some 116,000 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present.
The official website for all the museums of Florence including the Uffizi Gallery, Pitti Palace and Bargello which house many of the greatest treasures of the Roman Empire, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods.
Directory of the Smithsonian collections including the National Zoo, National Portrait Gallery, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and Air & Space Museum.
One of the largest and finest collections of Ancient, Classical,Western and Islamic art, the Louvre houses over 35,000 pieces within a 60,000 meter exhibition area. The Louvre website provides various online databases including the Inventory of the Department of Prints and Drawings, La Fayette Database of American Art, and Joconde. Other resources include multimedia collection tours and analysis of major pieces in the collection in addition to excellent images for reference.
AATA is a comprehensive database of 100,000 abstracts and bibliographic records of literature related to the preservation and conservation of material cultural heritage. Subjects covered include: restoration; preservation; technical documentation of works of art; material culture; archaeological and architectural sites and materials; etc.
Registration is required to access the database, but no fee is necessary.
Registration is necessary, but the site is free. The registration page states that the site has over 3.5 million auction records dating back to the 1920s.
Registration does not offer saving or e-mailing of search results.
In order to search auction records, one should use the Search Lots at Auction search form rather than the simple search box at the top, which searches only the broader ARTINFO site. The information available is extensive and includes worldwide locations for such major auction houses as Sotheby's and Christie's. A search for Christie's Amsterdam, for instance, returned over 49,000 results, with 1,000 results viewable at a time. One may search by artist name, artwork title, and auction house and then combine these searches with each other or with other limiters such as medium, year of work, price at auction, dimensions, sale date, and lot number. Search results may include an image along with descriptive information and further data such as provenance, markings on th
A biographical and methodological database intended as a beginning point to learning the background of major art historians of western art history. A free, copyrighted scholarly database for the use of researchers, students and the public.
Europeana is a multi-lingual portal that acts as an interface to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe. Just a few of the cultural treasures you will find on the Europeana portal are: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, the works of Charles Darwin and the music of Mozart.
Terminology and other information about the objects, artists, concepts, and places important to various disciplines that specialize in art, architecture and material culture.
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.
A structured vocabulary currently containing around 293,000 names and other information about artists. Names in ULAN may include given names, pseudonyms, variant spellings, names in multiple languages, and names that have changed over time (e.g., married names). Among these names, one is flagged as the preferred name.
The collections at Loggia explore select areas of study in art and art history, architecture and design, the decorative arts, industrial design, and classical studies such as Greek, Roman, and Celtic mythology.
Sacred Destinations is an ecumenical guide to more than 1,250 sacred sites, holy places, pilgrimage destinations, religious architecture and sacred art in over 60 countries around the world. In addition to richly illustrated articles, there are photo galleries containing over 24,000 high-quality images plus detailed maps.
The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism periods (1000-1850), currently containing over 23.200 reproductions. Picture commentaries, artist biographies are available.
From the website: "The Web Gallery of Art is intended to be a free resource of art history primarily for students and teachers. It is a private initiative not related to any museums or art institutions, and not supported financially by any state or corporate sponsors. However, we do our utmost, using authentic literature and advice from professionals, to ensure the quality and authenticity of the content."
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