Guides: ARTH 200 World Art History I: Other Resources

Writing in Art History

The Purdue Online Writing Lab offers helpful information on writing strategies for art history, including essays and museum title cards.

A Short Guide to Writing about Art by Sylvan Barnet
Call Number: N7476 .B37 2011
ISBN: 9780205708253
Publication Date: 2010-01-03
Students are shown how to analyze pictures (drawings, paintings, photographs), sculptures and architecture, and are prepared with the tools they need to present their ideas through effective writing.

Art History Resources Online

Explore Ancient Objects (Getty)
A selection of ancient Greek, Roman, and Etruscan objects n the Getty Museum
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History - The Metopolitan Museum of Art
A chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated by the Museum's collection. It is authored by The Met’s experts, and comprises 300 chronologies and close to 1,000 essays and more than 7,000 works of art.
Mother of All Art and Art History Links Page
Maintained by the M school of art and design (University of Michigan)
Art History Resources on the Web
Maintained by Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, Barton-Laing Professor in Art History, Sweet Briar College - online since 1995
Digital Scriptorium
An international image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts.
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The Digital Scriptorium is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.

As a visual catalog, DS allows scholars to verify with their own eyes cataloguing information about places and dates of origin, scripts, artists, and quality. Special emphasis is placed on the touchstone materials: manuscripts signed and dated by their scribes. DS records manuscripts that traditionally would have been unlikely candidates for reproduction. It fosters public viewing of materials otherwise available only within libraries. Because it is web-based, it encourages interaction between the knowledge of scholars and the holdings of libraries to build a reciprocal flow of information. Digital Scriptorium looks to the needs of a very diverse community of medievalists, classicists, musicologists, paleographers, diplomatists and art historians. At the same time Digital Scriptorium recognizes the limited resources of libraries; it bridges the gap between needs and resources by means of extensive rather than intensive cataloguing, often based on legacy data, and sample imaging.

Digital Scriptorium institutional partners have instituted a governance structure to plan jointly for the future of the program, in terms of scope, sustainability, and content.

Presently viewable on the DS website are records for 5,300 manuscripts and for 24,300 images.

Tiles on the Digital Scriptorium homepage and throughout the site are from Berkeley, University of California, Bancroft Library, UCB 059.

General Web Resources on Your Topic

IFAR: International Foundation for Art Research
A nonprofit educational and research organization dedicated to integrity in the visual arts. IFAR offers impartial and authoritative information on authenticity, ownership, theft, and other artistic, legal, and ethical issues concerning art objects.
Getty Vocabularies
contain structured terminology for art, architecture, decorative arts and other material culture, archival materials, visual surrogates, and bibliographic materials.

Musuems & Galleries

Art Institute of Chicago
Ashmolean Museum
Oxford
British Museum
London
Cleveland Museum of Art
Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum
Washington, D.C.
de Young
San Francisco
Freer + Sackler Galleries
Washington, D.C.
Gyeongju National Museum
Gyeongju, Korea
Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, New York
Musée du Louvre
Paris, France
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
National Gallery of Art
Washington, D.C.
National Museum of African Art
Washington, D.C.
National Art Museum of China
Beijing
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Prado
Madrid, Spain
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Washington, D.C.
Tate Online
Museums in the UK
The Getty
Los Angeles, CA
Tokyo National Museum
Vatican Museum
Vatican City
Victoria and Albert Museum
London, UK
The Warburg Institute
London, UK

What is a Primary Source

An actual work of art, whether a painting or a building, is a primary source. A primary source is "first-hand" information, sources as close as possible to the origin of the information or idea under study. Primary sources are contrasted with secondary sources, works that provide analysis, commentary, or criticism on the primary source. In historical studies, primary sources include written works, recordings, or other source of information from people who were participants or direct witnesses to the events in question. Examples of commonly used primary sources include memoirs, personal correspondence, oral histories, and contemporary newspaper accounts.

Books written by the artist, such as a journal/diary/autobiography/letters are examples of primary sources. Newspaper and magazine articles written by someone who attended an opening or a talk by an artist would be primary sources. Books and articles written by friends and associates during the artist's lifetime would also be primary sources.