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Art History
- Casselman Archive of Islamic and Mudejar Architecture in Spain
The Casselman Archive includes over 4,000 digitized color and black and white photos of Islamic architecture in Spain, documenting over 1000 years of Islamic influence on Iberian art and architecture. - 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition
The Digital Contest Library at the University of Minnesota, College of Design and Liberal Arts has added over 400 images of the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. The images include black and white photographs, architectural drawings, landscape architecture, and paintings from a variety of artists including Richard Morris Hunt, Frederick Law Olmstead, and Charles Atwood. - Aga Khan Visual Archive
MIT's Aga Khan Visual Archive hosts over 120,000 digital images visualizing Islamic art and architecture as well as urban design practices. This repository includes images captured over a 30 year period to document both historic and contemporary sites and is accessible to academic and non-academic users through the MIT Libraries Dome, a Web portal that provides access to some of the university's archival collections. - American Museum of Natural History Division of Anthropology
The AMNH Division of Anthropology has collected over 500,000 objects representing the peoples of Africa, Europe, Asia, the Pacific Islands and the Americas. Over 170,000 of the 500,000 objects have been digitally imaged and can be accessed through this website. - Ancient Theater Archive
Created by Thomas G. Hines at Whitman College, this website serves as a comprehensive reference source for Greco-Roman theaters in the Mediterranean. The site includes a glossary of classical architectural terms, maps, histories, theater measurements, audience capacity, panoramas, location of the archaeological archives, and plans with restoration overlays. - Andrew Alpern Collection of Drawing Instruments
Andrew Alpern, the famous New York-based architectural historian has donated his collection of over 170 sets of architectural drawing instruments from Europe and the United States to the Avery Library at the Columbia University. The collection also includes related trade catalogs and rare books. - Ara Pacis Augustae
This website provides in-depth visual documentation on the reconstruction and recreation of the Ara Pacis Augustae in Rome. Sources on the website provide scholarly publications, models, drawings, and photographs that help to rebuild the history of the monumental building and its now permanent home at the Richard Meier-designed Museo dell'Ara Pacis. - Arcade: New York Art Resource Consortium
Arcade combines material and cultural history documents from the Frick Art Reference Library and the libraries of the Museum of Modern Art and Brooklyn Museum, making 800,000 visual and textual records available for public use. - Archipedia
Archipedia is an American architecture search tool that provides access to authoritative information on over 11,000 buildings. Users can perform searches utilizing a number of terms, including architect, period and style, building type, materials, location, and more. Search results include images, a map triangulating all projects that match the search term, and other search terms that might generate additional materials. - Architectural History 102: Renaissance and Baroque Architecture
The University of Virginia Libraries hosts Architectural History 102, a visual resource collection focusing on Renaissance and Baroque architecture. Images included create social and historical context, and reveal evolving architectural forms. - Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America
The Library of Congress American Memory site hosts over 29,000 images architecture and interior design created in the twentieth century. The Gottscho-Schleisner Collection concentrates on sites in the northeastern United States focusing on architectural subjects that include interiors and exteriors of homes, stores, offices, factories, historic buildings, and other structures. Each image is accompanied by detailed metadata as well as direction for legal use. - Architecture Web Resources
The Architecture Studies Library at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas has an online guide containing links to web resources on topics related to architecture. This continuously evolving database was established in 1993 by Jeanne Brown, head of UNLV Architecture Studies Library. - Arkitekturmuseet Picture Bank
Arkitekturmuseet's Picture Bank contains 2,500 digital photographs and drawings primarily documenting twentieth-century Swedish design. The images available through Arkitekturmuseet showcase Scandinavian architecture and urbanism while illustrating the lifestyle of the modern. Building and formal typologies represented include industry and retail trade, sport and leisure facilities, the landscape, furniture and furnishings, and interior design for bothprivate and public buildings. - Arounder
Travel site Arounder uses Google maps to organize interactive, panoramic exhibits of a number of European cities and a few American sites. For each location listed on Arounder, a number of panoramic views are available including views of church interiors, city streets, public plazas, and natural or manufactured landscapes. - Art Babble
Art Babble is a unique tool for accessing video resources regarding contemporary and modern art. Created by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Art Babble “is a destination for art content online.” Art Babble incorporates videos that include interviews with artists and museum curators, and popular art programming. PBS, LACMA, MOMA, the New York Public Library, SFMOMA, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum are among contributing partners. - Art in Context
This online reference library contains an extensive listing of artists with links to exhibition history and gallery representation. - Art Institute of Chicago Architecture Collections
Access to over 500 digital images, including architectural drawings and fragments, "System of Architectural Ornament" by Louis Sullivan, and the Bertrand Goldberg Archives. - Art Institute of Chicago: Chicago Architects Oral History Project
PDF files of interviews with almost eighty architects who helped build Chicago in the 20th century. - Art of the Poster 1880-1918
Lawrence University, in collaboration with the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, presents poster images from the late nineteenth century in its Digital Library Collection. Graphic designers and illustrators like Alphonse Mucha, Jules Cheret, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec are represented throughout the collection. In addition, other artists from art periods like Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession are also prominent within this digital repository of images. - Art Project Powered by Google
Art Project, powered by Google, creates an avenue for virtual touring of museums from all over the world. Explore exhibits through the Street Viewing technology, which allows the viewer to move around the gallery through interactive floors plans and select works that interest you. View these pictures at high resolutions through the custom viewing zoom feature. Create your own collection by saving specific views of images in a personalized basket and share it with your family and friends! - Art Resource
Art Resource is the world's largest photo archive of fine art, offering material from prehistoric times to the present. The online collection carries works from many of the world's major museums and functions as the official rights and permission holder to the images for many of the institutions represented from both the United States and abroad. - Artchive
Mark Harden's Artchive includes critical resources (written by E.H. Gombrich, Meyer Shapiro, etc.), author biographies, gallery commentary and images of art and sculpture. - Artcyclopedia
Artcyclopedia is a fine arts search engine that allows the user to search for artists' works online. The website organizes artwork through major movements, such as Arte Povera, Pop Art, and Fauvism, and connects the user to images online from museums, archives, and institutions from around the world. The website also updates what artist exhibitions are occurring around the world and what new works have been acquired by museums as well. - Artfinder
Artfinder has partnered with galleries, libraries, museums and artists worldwide to build an extremely comprehensive online catalogue of fine art featuring over 250,000 works from over 400 institutions. - Artists Documentation Project
The artist is always the best authorities in evaluating the work in current, contextual conditions and identifying other tangible qualities, and ultimately, helping to preserve these ideas. With this in mind, former Menil chief conservator Carol Mancusi-Ungaro began filming artists with specific works of art, recording their feelings toward the inevitable aging process of their creations. In 1990 with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Menil established the Artists Documentation Program which filmed interviews with the artists to stand as a statement on conservation and preservation of their works. These films are important objects of research and scholarship and are now available through the online archive. - Artists' Books
This an online collection holds approximately 1,000 books including the most significant 20th century and contemporary artists’ books, among them livre d’artiste, avant-garde, conceptual, and contemporary works. Individual web pages for sixteen of the most significant book works contain a gallery of images to navigate the entire work, a brief biography on the artist, a description of the book and the books colophon. - ArtsConnectEd
ArtsConnectEd is an interactive web site that provides access to works of art and educational resources. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Walker Art Center collaborated to create an interface which users can browse the museums' digitized items including works of art, texts, audio, and film. The Art Collector function allows the user to save, customize, present and share items in sets. - Artscope
SFMOMA designed this visual browsing tool for searching their collection - ARTstor
Digital library with approximately 750,000 images of art, architecture, and archeology. Subscription is available to UT affiliates with an EID. - ARTstor Blog: Teaching with ARTstor Category
The ARTstor blog's Teaching with ARTstor category is a useful tool for determine how best to use materials contained in the ARTstor collection. Each Teaching with ARTstor entry focuses on a unique topic ranging from African architecture to race and identity in American art to women's suffrage, and provides material to support these subjects. - ARTstor now on Facebook
ARTstor, the premier digital library for over one million images on art, architecture and humanities is now on Facebook! - Asian Historical Architecture
Ranging from monumental to vernacular architecture, this site contains over 10,000 images of 677 sites in sixteen countries. - Atlas of Early Printing
The University of Iowa libraries presents the Atlas of Early Printing is a website designed to be used as a teaching tool for early history in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century. The interactive site allows the user to implement different layers showing locations of universities, paper mills, printing offices, and trade routes from 1450 to 1500. In addition, an animated 3D video illustrates the print-making process in the 16th century. - behold
behold allows you to browse flickr for images that are free to use and modify or circulate commercially. This search tool simplifies the process of determining limits of use while enabling the user to access a wide range of photographs, taken and published by amateurs and professionals the world over. - Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur
Bildindex consists of around 2 million images of art and architecture located in Germany and throughout Europe. This includes a range of image types--drawings, photographs, paintings, prints, etc. The product of over 30 years of collection development, Bildindex hosts special collections and continues to sponsor further digitization projects. - Blanton Museum of Art Online Collections
The Blanton Museum of Art's expansive online database features high-resolution images and detailed information for over 17,000 artworks searchable by keyword, artist name or nationality, period or exhibition. - Bridgmen Education
Bridgeman Education provides access to over 300,000 images of every civilization from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica and every period from Prehistory to the present across continents and traditions. Collection categories include fine arts, engravings, sculpture, architecture, archaeology and ethnography, history, science and medicine, decorative arts and artifacts. A subscription is required to use the site, though students may contact the institution for individual licensing. - Bridgmen: Art Culture History
With images from over 8,000 collections and more than 29,000 artists, Bridgeman Art Library is a comprehensive source for fine art and historical images. - British Library Online Gallery
This site showcases over 90,000 items in the collections of the British Library, including over 1,000 maps and plans of London. - British Museums Collection Database
Currently includes objects from Africa; the Americas; central, east, south and southeast Asia, including the Sir Percival David Collection of Chinese ceramics; ancient Egypt and Sudan; Europe; ancient Greece and Rome; the Middle East; Oceania; prehistory; the Museum’s collection of two-dimensional art. - CAEA - Digital Scrolling Paintings Project
The University of Chicago Center for the Art of East Asia is creating a database of Chinese handscroll paintings in a scrolling digital format. The Digital Scrolling Paintings Project aims to create a database that at once provides access to these rarely displayed artifacts while enabling a full investigation of the images and ideograms rendered. - Calisphere
Created by the University of California system, Calisphere is a primary resource database containing over 150,000 documents concerning the history of California. Available materials include photographs, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts. - CAMIO
OCLC's Catalog of Art Museum Images Online is a growing online visual resource collection documenting works of art from around the world, representing the collections of prominent museums. - Carlo Scarpa Archive Project
The Carlo Scarpa Archive project endeavors to preserve the architecture of and the process of practicing architecture employed by Scarpa throughout his career. The project website includes the digitized project drawings for the Museo di Castelvecchio, an interactive floorplan contextualizing these working drawings, and a bibliography chronicling the use of these drawings. As time passes, the archive will digitize drawings and photography for other Scarpa projects. - Castles of Japan
High quality images of castles from the Medieval to Edo Period. - Centre des Monuments Nationaux
The Centre des Monuments Nationaux conserves, restores, and manages nearly 100 national monuments, opening up these sites of social, cultural, and architectural history for public consumption. The website uses a geographic search feature in order to locate each monument page. Monument pages include photographs and videos, points of historical interests, details about tours and other activities on site, and a list of literature specific to the building. - CGFA: A Virtual Art Museum
CGFA is a virtual art museum featuring images of European and American art from the 1400s forward. The site is organized by artist name, but can also be navigated chronologically. - Chester Beatty Library Image Gallery
Divided into three major exhibit categories, the Chester Beatty Library Image Gallery combines images of Islamic, East Asian and Western art. Textiles, illuminated manuscripts and painting dominate the collection. - Chronicling America
The Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities have partnered to create Chronicling America, a newspaper database that allows you to view newspaper pages from 10 different states and dating from 1880-1910. Chronicling America also includes a search directory with access to information about newspapers collected from as early as 1690. - Column of Trajan
The Trajan's column website provides detailed photographic documentation with over 500 images of the column's frieze. In addition, the site supplies written narratives to contextualize the column and celebrate its construction and history. Indices and a helpful search engine facilitate site navigation to allow for a comprehensive experience of the column in the digital medium. - Council of Independent Colleges Historic Campus Architecture Project
The Council of Independent Colleges has developed the Historic Campus Architecture Project (HCAP), a database that organizes university sites by type, style, designer, function and time period. This database currently includes information for campus master plans, buildings and landscapes at nearly 400 institutions of higher learning. - Daily Telegraph's Arts Picture Galleries
Information about current and recent exhibtions in the U.K. - Danish Furniture
danish-furniture.com showcases a beautifully photographed collection of modern Danish classics. The Website operates as a virtual exhibition, featuring images of over 150 seminal works that cite respective architects and manufacturing information. - DASE
DASE is a collaborative digital media repository/search engine/slideshow maker/rss feed creation tool. Material on this site may be used for educational purposes by current faculty, students, and staff of The University of Texas at Austin. Provides access to materials, licensed or otherwise, for which the copyright is held by owners other than the university. - designinform
designinform links three databases to provide access to over 70,000 abstract and index records from art and design journals published during the twentieth century. - Digital Collections at The Center for Research Libraries
Taken from the collection of journalist Edward Hunter, this database provides access to mass education pamphlets circulated in Hong Kong and Mainland China between the years 1947 and 1954. - Digital Images Collection Wiki
The Digital Images Collection Wiki is an extensive resource for links to other image resource groups that offer access to free collections for study and research. These include visual resources collections from universities, flickr groups etc. - Digital Imaging Project
Over thirteen thousand images of architecture and sculpture from antiquity to the present compiled by Mary Ann Sullivan of Bluffton University. - Earth Album
Earth album is a Flickr mash-up that allows you to explore photos from around the world using Google maps and Flickr. - Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
The University of California, Berkeley has created the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) as "a global consortium of people who share the vision of creating a distributed virtual library of cultural information with a time and place interface." ECAI uses the concepts of time and space to organize and analyze visual data as well as integrate it into a broader network of cultural phenomena. - Europeana
Europeana is an internet portal, originally launched in 2008, with the goal of making Europe's social, artistic and scientific heritage accessible to the public. The website is run through the National Library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and the site features millions of books, paintings, exhibits, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitized throughout Europe. Over 1500 institutions have contributed to Europeana, including the British Library in London, Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Louvre in Paris. - Flickr Hive Mind
The Flickr Hive Mind photography search engine is a crowd-curated search tool with a number of search return options along with features that allow users to create groups, tag favorites and search by rights type. - Flickr: The Commons
a digital space where cultural heritage organizations, including the Library of Congress and the Brooklyn Museum, have published holdings from their photography archives. - Fotopedia Heritage App
Fotopedia an online photo encyclopedia is providing an app that has 20000 pictures, wikipedia abstracts and other resources concerning UNESCO's World Heritage Sites. - Frank Lloyd Wright App for iPhone
An iPhone App for searching through Frank Lloyd Wright’s works is now available at the Apple iTunes Store. This App helps to locate Wright’s buildings and also gives a description and photograph of each. The App is based on the book The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, A Complete Catalog by Dr. William Allin Storrer. - Furniture and the Decorative Arts in the Western Home
The History of Furniture and the Decorative Arts in the Western Home is a repository of web resources that provide an historical perspective on western interiors. Links also include information on furniture styles and the history of wallpaper and textiles. - German History in Documents and Images
German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of original historical materials documenting German history in ten sections beginning with the early modern period and moving into the present. Each section includes an introduction to key historical developments during the period as well as a selection of primary source documents (in German and English), images and relevant maps. All of the materials can be accessed through keyword and author searches. Advanced options also allow searches to be limited and refined. - Getty Collection Online
Explore the J. Paul Getty Museum's extensive collection through the museum's online database. The collection can be searched by object type or medium, theme, or artist name. - Google Art Project
A repository of art and art historical content that allows users to experience a wide range of artworks, explore museums through virtual tours, and build and share collections. - Google Earth Prado Masterpieces
Google Earth has incorporated ulta-high resolution images of fourteen masterpieces from the Museo del Prado’s collection. - Graphic Atlas
explores the science behind prints from the pre-photographic to the digital. With magnified views of the emulsion, and of the print under various light sources, the Graphic Atlas aids in the identification and understanding of photographic processes. - Great Archaeological Sites
The Great Archaeological Sites website, administered by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, links to a number of sites that catalog archaeological findings at locations both inside and outside of France. Linked sites focus on the cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc, Greco-roman culture in Lattes and Languedoc, and medieval architecture in Saint-Denis, along with several additional locations dated between the prehistoric and medieval periods. - Grove Art Online
Grove Art Online comprises the full text of The Dictionary of Art and The Oxford Companion to Western Art. - Guide to Japanese Castles
With over 1000 images of Japanese castle architecture and landscapes, this site documents 130 of these castles organizing material by site condition and castle name. Historic and tourist designations function as additional search mechanisms. - Harvard University Library Visual Information Access
VIA (Visual Information Access) is a growing online union catalog documenting the arts, material culture, and social history. VIA contains descriptive records and images representing paintings, sculpture, photography, drawings, prints, architecture, decorative arts, trade cards, rubbings, theater designs, maps and plans. Participating repositories include archives, museums, libraries, and other collections throughout Harvard University. New material is added to VIA daily. - Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
This timeline is a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as prepared by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. - Herbet Cole Archives on ARTstor
More than 940 images featuring African art, architecture and culture photographed by art historian Herbert Cole is now available on ARTstor. The images are from the Herbert Cole archives at the University of California, Santa Barbara. - High Definition Images of Selected Historical Art Work
Halta Definizione in partnership with a number of technological partners presents high definition images of historical art work. Reproductions of works of art such as Leonardo da Vinci's 'The Last Supper' can now be closely observed to reveal even the deterioration of paint used in them. - Historical Photographs of China
The Historical Photographs of China Project is a collaboration between scholars and the University of Bristol, University of Lincoln, and the Institut d'Asie Orientale, resulting in the online publication of nearly 7,000 images has assembled a vast database of photographs and other images documenting the history of China in the 20th century. - History of Photography: Guide to Research
This guide introduces the standard reference tools for research in the history of photography. The annotations provided for each title listed describe the scope of the work and should help the researcher determine if the source is pertinent to his or her interests. - Huntington Archive Black and White Photograph Collection of Asian Art
This digital collection holds approximately 30,000 images of Asian art and architecture. Countries included in this collection are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma) Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. - ICAA Documents: 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art
The International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has developed the Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art digital archive to provide access to materials that document the development of Latin American and Latino art. This ongoing project currently includes primary sources and critical documents that support research on art in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Latino USA. - IDEAS, Image Database to Enhance Asian Studies
Unifies digitizing efforts already in progress at various campuses into a shared searchable database of images, open to anyone with access to the World Wide Web. - Idée Labs
Idée Labs has created image search tools including the Multicolour Search Lab that utilizes up to ten different colors to access images in both Alamy and Flickr. Two additional search tools access images in Alamy including the tag-based Visual Search Lab, and image-based BYO Image Search Lab. - Impossible Project
Aims to re-start production of analog instant film for vintage Polaroid cameras in 2010. - Inmagine
Inmagine is a royalty-free stock photography site with over 3.5 million images from over 100 best-selling collections. - International Dunhuang Project
The Internation Dunhuang Project is a consortium of academic institutions from all over the world that hosts over 270,000 images of paintings, textiles, and manuscripts that document Eastern silk road culture. - Intute
Intute is a free online services that locates the best website for research in fields including art, architecture, engineering and geography. - J.-E Berger Foundation: World Art Treasures
Jacques-Édouard Berger was a noted traveler and art collector. J-E Berger traveled extensively through the United States, Europe and Asia and brought back photographs of art and architecture. - Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH)
JSAH Online will mediate the dialogue between traditional modes of scholarship and emerging media, supporting film, video, virtual modeling, digital mapping, QTVR panoramic photographs, and zoomable images that will enrich the readers experience and understanding of the architectural subject. - Know the Alhambra
Know the Alhambra incorporates a visual and textual material detailing the social, political, and construction histories of the Alhambra, Generalife and surrounding territory. It's image collection includes both historic images of the site and its surroundings as well as contemporary shots of gardens, courtyards and interiors at both palaces along with images of the urban setting. In addition, Know the Alhambra includes a virtual tour of the palace and provides a brief history of Arab expansion into the Spain as well as general information for tourists and researchers. - Korean Cultural Heritage Administration
The Cultural Heritage Administration was created by the Korean State to designate and preserve sites that are considered national treasures and of historic value. This overarching mission encompasses the physical preservation of architecture, sculpture and the natural or imposed landscape of palaces, tombs and even vernacular sites. - LACMA Image Collection
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has created a new image collection website in support of its mission to provide tools for educational endeavors. The collection includes a wide array of themes, including African Art, Islamic Art, and European paintings. Many of these works are in the public domain and are available at a high resolution, free of charge, and without restrictions. Some images, however, are deemed "Protected Content" and have restrictive uses. - Life of a City: Early Films of New York
From the Library of Congress, these early films from the turn of the twentieth century range from the construction of skyscrapers and subways to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. - LIFE Photo Archive
Google has made millions of images available online from the LIFE photo archive - Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge
USC Professor of History and Political Science Philip Ethington developed this website to confront the issues that plague urban historical investigations of Los Angeles. The site content examines the city through images and, essays both historical and historiographical, to treat the subject comprehensively. The content includes photographs, plans, models, maps, photomontages, and "reflexive index sets," historic images grafted onto a present-day photograph to demonstrate the scope of site history. - Lunch with Landmarks: Discussion on Anthony Caro and his sculpture Veduggio Glimpse
What: Lunch with Landmarks Discussion When: Friday, October 8, 2010 Noon - 1pm Where: Pathway between Goldsmith and Sutton Halls Notes: Free for all. Feel free to bring lunch to the event. - Mapping Gothic France
Mapping Gothic France is a visual exploration of the parallel narratives of Gothic architecture and the formation of France. The site includes databases of images, texts, charts and historic maps, allowing users to triangulate French political and architectural history geospatially and temporally in addition to offering a narrativized accounting of France's Gothic structures. - Medieval New York
This site integrates the architectural histories of New York City and the Middle Ages. Detailed building descriptions for a number of New York City's religious and residential structures, as well as landscapes, locate this heterogeneous architectural culture within the history of medieval European, Byzantine and Islamic art, architecture, technology and religion. - MetPublications
Developed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MetPublications is a database that provides access to over 650 texts published by the museum since 1964. MetPublications offers a variety of search options as well as access to full titles at zero cost. This includes the option to download a title in PDF format. - Modern Homes Survey - New Canaan
The Philip Johnson Glass House Historical Trust is creating a narrative survey of the 91 existing modern homes in New Canaan to provide a “criteria of significance” for their future preservation. The Trust also hopes to expand the online database to other clusters of modern homes. - Museum of the City of New York Collections Portal
The Museum of the City of New York Collections Portal provides access to over 100,000 high-resolution historical photographs highlighting construction, architecture and local culture. - Museum Volkenkunde
The Museum Volkenkunde boosts a collection of artefacts that reveal the culture of new worlds explored by Europeans in the Early Modern period. This includes over 200,000 artefacts from Asia, the Americas, Africa and the South Pacific. The online database includes pictures and descriptions of all the artefacts and its search mechanism is set up to allow the user to browse images by object, geographical location, or cultural area. - National Gallery of Art Images
The National Gallery of Art recently launched NGA Images a new image resource featuring the gallery's extensive collection in digitized form. Alongside its new platform, NGA announces an open access policy that allows users to search, browse, share, and download from its repository of over 20,000 images. - New York City Department of Records Municipal Archive Online Gallery
New York City Department of Records Municipal Archive Online Gallery holds over 870,000 images from 30 different historical collections comprising 160 years of New York City history. Images can be searched and stored on a designated workspace for use in research and presentations. Motion picture and sound recordings are also available. - New York City Graffiti and Street Art Project
The Graffiti and Street Art Project was produced by Lewis & Clark College's Watzek Library. It was an experiment to develop and employ mobile technologies for teaching and learning with the expectation that the project might one day serve as a model for creating collaborative digital image projects with mobile devices and Flickr for a non-traditional classroom setting. Students used digital cameras, smart phones, and other social software to document and catalog the ephemeral graffiti and street art throughout the five boroughs of New York City in the Fall of 2010. - Northern Italian Sketchbook Project
Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s (1868-1928) sketches of Northern Italy during his tour of the continent in 1891. - Olmsted Research Guide
a database that provides access to archival materials - drawings, plans and correspondence - that relate to the landscape design of Frederick Law Olmsted, his sons, John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted Junior. - Paris 26 Gigapixels
Paris 26 Gigapixels provides high-resolution, panoramic views of the French capital. The image is set up for zooming and also includes icons that provide commentary on various points of interest in the city. - Perseus Digital Library
Tufts University's Perseus Digital Library features a collection of primary and secondary sources for the study of ancient Greece and Rome, including over 56,000 images. - Photographs from the German Federal Archive
Available on the Wikimedia Commons, this collection of over 100,000 photographs document the political and personal lives of Germans over the course of the twentieth century. Examples of the built environment are also included. - Photomuse
Developed through an alliance between George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film and the International Center of Photography (ICP), Photomuse provides a comprehesive and illustrated chronology of the history of photography accompanied by a number of exhibits that explore various geographical, political, stylistic, and urban themes in both film and photography. - Piero della Francesca: The Legend of the True Cross
Three dimensional interactive model with audio commentary of the Renaissance fresco cycle - Places
Places is a a fully web-based, open-access, interdisciplinary journal focusing on contemporary architecture, landscape, and urbanism, and its impact on the public realm as physical place and social ideal. - Public Art Archive
The Public Art Archive™, a new project presented by the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), is a searchable database of public art in the United States. The Archive makes art more accessible to the public with sophisticated searchable databases of art throughout the United States. The Archive makes public art and its processes more accessible by displaying images of each piece alongside an extensive description, including audio and video supplementary files when they are available. - Reseau Art Nouveau Network
The Reseau Art Nouveau Network was formed in 1999 to provide a general appraisal of the conditions of Art Nouveau buildings throughout Europe. In the process, the network created an image bank including photographs of Art Nouveau architecture, industrial design, sculpture and art in its 22 member cities and regions. In addition, the network provides a comprehensive list of theses completed on the topic of the Art Nouveau as well as a list of documentation centers in order to facilitate and encourage further study. - Resonance 104.4fm
The world's first radio arts station, London's Resonance 104.4fm promotes a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural dialogue about the arts, history and society. Resonance fosters experimentation in visual and sonic arts, and functions as an invisible gallery collecting and reflecting upon works of art that are new, undiscovered, forgotten or even impossible. - Rob Linrothe's Tibetan and Buddhist Art Photography Now on ARTstor
1200 images of Tibetan and Buddhist art, architecture and monuments from Rob Linrothe’s collection is now available at ARTstor. This collection is a part of his photographic work from Tibet, China, India and Indonesia. - ROM Images
The Royal Ontario Museum's online image collection, ROM, incorporates images of the built environment, world cultures and natural history from its collection. Images located on ROM can be used privately and licensing can be facilitated for all other uses. - Russian Utopia: A Depository
An online archive of a Russian museum which collects compact representations of Soviet projects that never came to fruition. - S. Charles Lee Papers
includes drawings and photographs of the works of this prolific designer of Art Deco movie theaters on the west coast and in Mexico. From the UCLA Digital Library. - Sacred Destinations
A guide to sacred places, pilgrimage sites, and religious art, covering over 1,250 places in 61 countries. User generated photographs, maps, travel guides and brief histories enrich the web resource. - Scandinavian Art: Renaissance to Modern
California State University has added over 500 images of Scandinavian art from the Renaissance to the twentieth century to their online image catalog. The images include sculptures, paintings, fashion, and architecture from nearly 400 years of history. The images are free and are openly available through the University’s website. - Scholars Resource
Scholars Resource hosts a number of image collections from contributors including Archivision, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The combined collection supports art historical curriculum in a number of areas including Prehistoric, Western, Islamic and Levantine, African, Asian, and Oceanic art. - Sidney D. Gamble Photographs
Sidney D Gamble Photographs Digital Collection at Duke University marks the first comprehensive public presentation of Gamble’s large body of work. This digital archive includes over 5000 photographs shot in China between 1917 and 1932. - Silk Road Seattle
Silk Road Seattle is an ongoing public education project that explores cultural interaction across Eurasia from the beginning of the Common Era to the Seventeenth Century. Silk Road Seattle provides historical texts, well illustrated web pages on historic cities and architecture and on traditional culture of the Central Asian nomads, extensive annotated bibliographies of resources, an electronic atlas, and a virtual art exhibit drawing on museum collections from around the world. - SIRIS Image Gallery: Ernst Herzfeld Papers
The Smithsonian plans on adding the work of Ernst Herzfeld to their online resources collection. Herzfeld, a leading scholar in Iranian studies, documented archaeological studies in many exotic places, including Persepolis, Aleppo, and Paikuli. Materials presented online include his personal notebooks, drawings, and sketchbooks. - Sistine Chapel QTVR
Villanova University of Pennsylvania has created a QTVR of the Sistine Chapel interior that allows the user to explore this famous institution's interior architecture and frescoes by Michelangelo. - smARThistory
smARThistory is an interactive alternative to the expensive and bulky art history primer. smARThistory incorporates a multimedia time-line and podcasts along with 220 images to illustrate 2600 years of art and architectural history. - Smithsonian American Art Museum
This site contains links to over 20,000 images in the Smithsonian's collections and it is updated daily. - Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) blog
The Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) blog explores American cultural history and resources relevant to its study. Entries investigate cultural events, the lives of American artists, gender history, photography, architecture and more, in addition to providing information about emerging or reemerging resources and resource centers relevant to research in the social sciences. - Spezify
Spezify is a search tool that presents textual, graphic, and photographic results in a visual format. Blogs, videos, microblogs and images, couple with web-based versions of more traditional print media to give comprehensive search results. - Spherical Images Virtual Tours
Spherical Images is a virtual tour company that captures 360° photographs of cultural sites and activities in 15.5 gigapixels. Check out their blog to access panoramas of Canterbury and St. Paul's Cathedrals, Leeds University, and the London Zoo. - Spiro Kostof Lectures
Podcasts for the lectures of this architectural historian's final class in 1991 at UC Berkeley, "A Historical Survey of Architecture and Urbanism." Topics run from the Florentine Rennaisance to the post modernism of the 20th century. - St. Peter's Basilica: Floorplan
This interactive floorplan, indicates the uses of each available space within the Vatican complex. The floorplan employs a system of letters and numbers to identify various sculptural and artistic elements in addition to locating elements of specific architectural significance including grottoes, the facade, the piazza, etc. Each letter and number links to an additional page that includes visual and textual information about the site indicated. - Tate Collection Online Subject Search
The Tate Collection Online Subject Search provides access to its online information pages for over 66,000 works of art by 3,075 artists. Each page provides important metadata about the object sometimes including a contextualizing description. The subject search function organizes these objects into categories including architecture, objects, history, people, abstraction, places, emotions, concepts, and ideas, religion and belief, and more. - TED: Architectural Inspiration
Featuring over 21 conference videos on the TEDTalks Architectural Inspiration page, TED has assembled thematic discussions from Moshe Safdie, Nathaniel Kahn, Daniel Libeskind and more focusing on sustainability, historicism, food culture, and uniqueness as it relates to the built environment and design inspiration. - The British Library Introduces Mobile App
The British Library introduces their new iPhone, iPad, and Smartphone App "Treasures" that includes over 100 highlights from literary, historical and scientific documents. Highlights include rare items like the original version of Alice in Wonderland, images of the world's oldest bible, and hand-painted medieval books. - The Charnel-House
The Charnel-House blog focuses on the history of avant-garde architecture, the environment, technology and utopianism in Russia and Central Europe, providing access to a wealth of historical images including photographs, sketches, blueprints, watercolors and more. - The Cold War Museum
A respository for virtual exhibitions examining the period of the Cold War, the Cold War Museum has created a number of photographic, documentary and graphic exhibits organized by themes, medium or timeline. This virtual museum aims to capture a larger visual history of the Cold War contextualizing these images through comparison and juxtaposition with written testimony and other primary textual resources. - The Complete Moreen O'Brien Maser Memorial Collection Now on ARTstor
ARTstor in partnership with the Visual Resources Collection at Skidmore College's Lucy Scribner Library now exhibits the complete collection of Moreen O'Brien Maser. The 850 images of pre-Colombian objects and sites that form the collection were photographed by Maser and covers Southwest United States and parts of Latin America and Europe. - The Cultural Landscape Foundation What's Out There Database
The Cultural Landscape Foundation's What's Out There database is organized by types (parks, etc.), subtypes (Public Park, Neighborhood Park, etc.), and styles (Picturesque, Modernist, etc.), and includes over 300 designer profiles accompanied by short historical essays and even longer biographical essays. With over 150 entries complete with textual and visual data, the database includes sites from all 50 states using the National Historic Landmark properties and National Register of Historic Places to determine sites featuring landscapes of significance. - The Database of Virtual Art
The Database of Virtual Art documents the rapidly evolving field of digital installation art. This complex, research-oriented overview of immersive, interactive, telematic and genetic art has been developed in cooperation with established media artists, researchers and institutions. - The Empire That Was Russia
The Empire That Was Russia is a searchable database of architecture, ethnic culture, transportation and other images focusing on contemporary Russian life taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer to Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. Through the digichromatography color rendering process, Prokudin-Gorskii's black and white and sepia toned images have been converted into color. - The Giza Archives Project
Containing excavation photographs, expedition diary entries, maps, and digitized books and articles, this site aims to become the world's central repository for the archaeological history of the Giza site. - The Glocal Project
A collaborative, multifaceted artist-led project that examines the changing role of digital image making today. - The History of Advertising Trust
The History of Advertising Trust combines over 200 years of advertising history into one archive. This British archive includes television and print materials from all over the world. - The Huntington Photographic Archive of Asian Art
The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Photographic Archive of Asian Art includes over 30,000 black and white images of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma) Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand captured over a 35 year time span. These photographs highlight the art, architectural and cultural history of these Asian cultures, and are accompanied by descriptive texts to facilitate use in the class room. - The Lively Morgue
The New York Times has created an archival blog to publish some of its most memorable and well-known images. Beginning in 1896, the Times began publishing images in their magazines, and over the next century, developed a vast image archive consisting of more than five million prints and contact sheets, 300,000 stacks of negatives ranging from 35 mm to 5x7 inches, and 13,500 DVDS filled with digital images. Each week, the blog will publish several photos from the archive, including the back of the image that shows the annotations and published captions of each image. The New York Times hopes to continue digitizing these images for greater accessibility to the public. - The Marquette Building
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has created a website that integrates historical texts, photography, drawings and video in an effort to communicate the architectural, cultural, and preservation histories of the Marquette Building. The website offers a multimedia learning experience that focuses on topics including design and construction,culture, socioeconomics, and marketing. - The Ohara Institute for Social Research, Hosei University
Though difficult at times to navigate, this Ohara Institute digital collection includes 2700 posters from before 1945 and 1400 posters form after the war integrating a number of themes key to understanding the socialization of an increasingly industrial and urban culture governed by a collective ideology. - The Palenque Project
The Group of the Cross Project is an archaeological team focusing on the Mayan city of Palenque located in Chiapas, Mexico. The group has created a website documenting its archaeological endeavors at Palenque. The site provides detailed information about cultural objects discovered on the site, the mapping process and site preservation. - The Petra Great Temple Excavation
Provides site plans and images of the Great Temple in Petra, Jordan. The site is administered by Brown University and the excavation is under the direction of Professor Martha Sharp Joukowsky. - The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation
The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation image database that allows the user to browse Lichtenstein works chronologically. In addition, the Foundation has documented Lichtenstein's public work including sculpture and murals, catalogued all Lichtenstein exhibits both past and present, and created a number of virtual tours intended to recreate the experience of various Lichtenstein exhibits staged in the past 15 years. - The State Hermitage Museum Digital Collection
The State Hermitage Museum Digital Collection provides access to high-resolution images of artwork, furniture, maps, archaeological artifacts, textiles, and more. The collection has a general search tool but can also be navigated by browsing geographically organized galleries categorized by field (Paintings, Prints, and Drawings, Applied Arts, Textiles, etc.). - The Virtual Museum of Iraq
The Virtual Museum of Iraq offers the viewer an interactive website that gives one as close an impression as visiting a museum in person. It features images and descriptions of exhibits ranging from prehistoric to Islamic in virtual “halls”. - The Weekly Wright-Up
The curatorial staff at the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo New York provide news and insights on Frank Lloyd Wright's 1904-1907 Prairie Style masterpiece in addition to exploring items related to Wright studies and the art, architectural and design practices in general in The Weekly Wright-up. - The Wellcome Library
The Wellcome Library has assembled an eclectic library of images that range from architectural photographs and representations to scanning electron micrographs (SEM) of cancer cells and bacteria. The Wellcome Library’s image collection is a useful resource for contextualizing architectural history, examining biological forms to create unique designs, and enhancing visual perspectives of the broader sphere of human biological, sociological, historical, and anthropological relations. - Turkish Cultural Foundation Image Archive
The Turkish Cultural Foundation Image Archive is a digitalized slide repository documenting Turkish art and culture as it has been exhibited in museums and other cultural locations around the world since 1955. The archive's graduate search tool allows the user to browse images by location and artifact type. - Turning the Pages
Turning the Pages Gallery provides access to virtual books featuring illuminated manuscripts from the early Renaissance, atlases, botanical illustrations, religious texts and more. - UCR California Museum of Photography Collection Search
The California Museum of Photography explores photographic media through exhibition, collection, publication, and the web to examine the history of photography and showcase current practice in photography and related media. The museum's online search tool allows the browser to search through nearly 55,000 records including images of industry, science and nature, portraits, photographic equipment, and much more. - Uncapping the Lens: The Early History of Photography
The Association of College and Research Libraries has compiled a list of internet resources that delve into the early history of photography, including various photographic techniques and early photographic exhibitions. - UNESCO World Heritage
A searchable database of the 878 sites deemed to have universal value by UNESCO. - University of Michigan AAEL Artists' Books
The University of Michigan’s Art, Architecture and Engineering Library offers a special collection of Artists’ Books. These can be accessed by anyone and the database can be browsed online. - VADS
Comprised of over 100,000 images, Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) image database is an online resource for the visual arts. - Virtual Museum of Canada
The Virtual Museum of Canada combines a number of collections from Canadian museums into an interactive and easily accessible format. With over 785,000 images in its Image Gallery, the VMC includes visual material ranging from contemporary paintings and photographs to World War I era helmets, chandeliers, textiles, and more. - Walters Art Museum on Wikimedia Commons
Walters Art Museum uploaded 19,000 freely-licensed images to Wikimedia Commons through the GLAM-Wiki initiative. These high-resolution files feature ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art and Old Master and 19th-century paintings. - Web Gallery of Art
The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods (1100-1850) and currently contains over 16.200 reproductions. - WestLicht
The WestLicht, the center of photography in Vienna, is an initiative striving to widen the importance of photography and it's development in Austria. WestLicht aims to show the relationship between equipment and the art of photography. The center holds a permanent collection of over 40,000 objects of various photographic techniques, ranging from plate photographs and glass transparencies to a wide variety of printing processes. The WestLicht exhibited numerous shows that represent a variety of photography projects including the Polaroid [Im]Possible Project, David Douglas Duncan's PICASSO, and Kaiserpanorama, a full-scale art installation apparatus for the presentation of large scale stereo images. - William Gedney Photographs and Writings
Duke University is home to the William Gedney collection, containing 50,000 papers and photographs documenting his activity from 1950s to early 1980s. The collection includes a wide range of images that capture urban and working class life in America, India and Europe. - Women Artists Archives National Directory
This site provides a web directory to U.S. archival collections of primary source materials by and about women visual artists active in the U.S. since 1945. - World Digital Library (WDL)
The World Digital Library hosts a collections of images, films, and sound recordings from around the world. Contributors predominantly include American, European, and Middle Eastern collections, but efforts are being made to engage African countries in the project. As a repository for cultural artifacts, WDL offers unparalleled access to these resources and promotes propitious cross-cultural exchange. - WorldImages
The California State University WorldImage database organizes 75,000 images into portfolios highlighting a wide range of content from around the globe including images of cities and building technology, religious and cultural art and artifacts, architecture, material culture, and more. In addition WorldImages hosts a few special collections including faculty contributions, special exhibits and the Sourisseau Academy Clark B. Waterhouse Collection. - Yale Silk Road Database
The Yale Silk Road Database presents over 6,000 images of major sites in the Silk Road region taken during faculty site seminars led by Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan (Professor, History of Art) under the auspices of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University in the summers of 2006-2009. - Yale University Art Gallery eCatalogue
The Yale University Art Gallery's eCatalogue allows internet users to search a collection of over 185,000 objects which includes over 2000 years of painting, sculpture, furniture and other interior/industrial design objects from all over the world.
