Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA)

BUBL Link an extensive list and well organised gateway to sites in the UK and abroad.

CELT Resources (Corpus of Electronic Texts) a digital project coordinated by Department of History, University College Cork featuring portals and gateways on textual and image databases of Irish historical and cultural interest. 

Design Council Slide Collection The emphasis is mainly upon British design in the postwar period up to 1990, but there are also many images illustrating examples of design from other countries and earlier periods.

DRAPIer an interactive database of digital humanities projects created by third level institutions on the island of Ireland. You can find projects of interest by searching for keywords or browsing by the facets listed on the right hand side of each page.

Great Buildings Online  this gateway to architecture around the world and across history documents a thousand buildings and hundreds of leading architects, with 3D models, photographic images and architectural drawings, commentaries, bibliographies, web links, and more, for famous designers and structures of all kinds.

Google Scholar is a freely-accessible web search engine that indexes the full-text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.

Intute  is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources. 

The National Fine Art Education Digital Collection Fineart.ac.uk is a prototype for a national web-based collection of work by staff and students of UK higher education institutions who have made a significant contribution to UK fine art education through practice.

Virtual Library museums pages an online museum directory, part of the Virtual Library, an expert-run catalog of sections of the web. The Virtual Library musuems pages (VLmp).

VADS (Visual Arts Data Services) a portal to British institutional image collections.

VoS: Art History Artcyclopedia: The Fine Art Search Engine (comprehensive list of links to image archives and museum websites searchable by artist name, title, and location).

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), currently containing over 17.300 reproductions. Commentaries on pictures, biographies of artists are available.

WorldArt Web Kiosk  provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project.

Wikipedia Visual Arts Portal is a useful resource for copyright cleared images.

World Wide Web Virtual Library: History of Art a collection of links relating to art history and computer applications in art history. 

Yahoo: Art History provides annotated links in multiple categories.

Select History of Art Web Portals & Gateways:

Codices Electronici Ecclesiae Coloniensis (CEEC): web portal for medieval manuscript holdings of the Episcopal and Cathedral Library Cologne, Germany.

The Catholic Encyclopedia: an excellent source for religious art history topics; the project is still in progress.

Classical Myth: The Ancient Sources (University of Victoria, Canada).

Encyclopaedia Mythica: an award-winning internet encyclopedia of mythology, folklore, and religion, including sections on Greek, Roman, and Celtic mythology.

Art and Architecture Thesaurus: Definitions of art and architectural terms.

Perseus: Greco-Roman the Perseus Classics collection integrates textual and visual materials on the Archaic and Classical Greek world and the Roman world. The collection contains extensive and diverse resources including primary and secondary texts, site plans, digital images, and maps. Art and archaeology catalogues document a wide range of objects.

The Glory of Byzantium the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Glory of Byzantium includes many images from the MMA's collection and can be accessed in a number of ways. You can explore Byzantine works of art, investigate a theme in Byzantine art, and probe the history of Byzantium. You can also view the works of art in a visual timeline. 

Ravenna Monuments Dynamic Images this website provides 360 degree dynamic panoramas of the historic early Christian basilicas of Ravenna, Italy. All images are zoom-enabled. Manipulate the images by dragging your cursor over them.  

Glossary of Medieval Art and Architecture the glossary is a searchable database of illustrated architectural terms and styles.

Medieval Manuscripts on the Web a resource portal compiled by Albert Masters, University of Toronto.

The Codices Electronici Sangallenses (CESG) website gives access to high resolution digital images of medieval codices in the Abbey Library of St Gallen in Switzerland (now a UNESCO World Heritage Centre). The aim is to bring these codices to a wider audience, and to partially replace the use of the fragile originals in the library. The codices available are shown in their entirety (including images of their binding), in high enough resolution to facilitate close study of their makeup as well as their content. Manuscripts represented range from: bibles; calendars; and antiphonals to: saints' lives; histories of the crusades; and a book of German pre-reformation songs. The site is available in French, German, English and Italian and includes a description of the CESG project and a brief history of the Abbey Library. The images are available for educational and research use, providing that the source is correctly cited, and are accompanied by detailed descriptions.

Amiens Cathedral Project at Columbia University. A multimedia project that provides computer generated images of Amiens Cathedral.

Les Tres Riches Heures Du Duc De Berry one of the image projects of the ARTFL Project, Univ. of Chicago. The pictures in this directory are from the calendar section of the Tres Riches Heures. This was painted some time between 1412 and 1416 and is arguably the most beautiful part of the manuscript; it is certainly the best known, being one of the great art treasures of France.

The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI)  is an evolving electronic archive of British and Irish Romanesque stone sculpture coordinated by the Courtauld Institute, London.

ItalyGuides  offers you a rich collection of more than 200 virtual panoramas of Italy's most famous city monuments. These can be explored 360° and each of them comes with text written by history of art professionals. ItalyGuides.it also provide free audio guides download (for iPod or mp3), video in high definition (HDTV), google maps and more than 3000 photos in the photo galleries. The site includes tours of Florence, Naples, Rome and Venice.

Investigating the Renaissance this interesting Harvard University Art Museum site uses digital imaging techniques to examine three Renaissance paintings: Portrait of a Man, The Virgin and Child, and The Last Judgment. The site explains and demonstrates how Infrared light, ultraviolet light and X-rays can provide valuable information on a painting's condition, on earlier stages of its production, and on later alterations.

The Digital Michelangelo Project researchers from Stanford University and the University of Washington are attempting to advance the technology of 3D scanning and place this technology in the service of the humanities by creating a long-term digital archive of some important cultural artefacts. The project focuses on some of Michelangelo's sculptures, including the famous David statue. Check out two photographic essays about a physical replica of the David and download ScanView, a program that lets you "fly around" models of Michelangelo's statues.

Vatican Museums, Vatican City this site offers online tours of the collections of art and antiquities at the Vatican museums. Collections include the Gregorian Egyptian and Etruscan Museums, Raphael's Rooms, the Pinacoteca (Art Gallery), and the Ethnological Missionary Museum. Visitors can examine various rooms in the Vatican, including the Sistine Chapel. Visitors may also take a virtual tour of each room.

NICE Paintings (The National Inventory of Continental European Paintings) database has been created by the National Inventory Research Project - a groundbreaking research project designed to gather and present information about Britain's public art collections. A team of researchers from the University of Glasgow and Birkbeck College (University of London) visited 200 museums from Penzance to Inverness in order to collate information and shed new light on European paintings from 1200 to 1900.

American Photographs: The First Century the Smithsonian American Art Museum offers a broad selection of photographs from The Charles Isaacs Collection of American Photography. The images include Civil War images by George Barnard and the Mathew Brady Studio, and western landscapes by Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson. There is a mix of familiar and lesser-known photographers and styles of work in order to explore ideas about the influence of photographic culture in America during the years from 1839 to 1939.

Albumen: albumen photographs history, science and preservation presenting the art and science of albumen printing, this site brings together 19th Century technical instruction, contemporary research, an online forum for conservation treatment and a

Art in Context is an online reference library for the publication and dissemination of information about contemporary artists and where to find their work.

Artists.org is a site presenting information about the major 20th Century and contemporary visual artists with portraits, dates and places of birth and death links to resources.

Crossings: electronic journal of art and technology "Crossings is a peer reviewed multidisciplinary academic journal that aims to explore the areas where technology and art intersect. Papers are encouraged on any topic related to art, technology or the philosophical issues raised by attempts to bridge the gap between art and science." The Crossings websites provides access to the full-text of the journal dating back to its first issue in 2001. Information about the journal and its editorial board are also provided, along with details of how to submit work for consideration.

Culture Lab based at Newcastle, promotes socially and economically valuable synergies with artists, creative industries, and cultural and scientific institutions, and the development of innovative research with digital tools.

DAM- Digital Art Museum includes a useful technology timeline.

Digital Consciousness a public database of contemporary art. The art and biographies of emerging and established artists are exhibited through galleries and artist pages.

European artists, a databank European-art.net provides information on artists, their activities, presentations in museums or galleries as well as photos and texts. European-art.net connects different archives and their digital databases that contain material of contemporary art through one search engine.

oVid database of experimental film and video art.

Online Picasso Project: biography, paintings, sculptures and writings.

PostMedia maintains an archive of work by contemporary artists since 1995, with commentary.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a leading non-profit resource for video art and interactive media. Founded in 1971, EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of new and historical media works by artists. EAI also offers educational services, viewing access, exhibitions and public programs. The Online Catalogue is a comprehensive resource on the 175 artists and 3,000 works in the EAI collection. The searchable database includes artists' biographies, QuickTime excerpts, research materials, artists' Web projects, and online ordering.

The Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts The Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts has set the goal for itself of promoting the wide development, application and distribution of, and reflection on new technologies in the visual arts.

VDB: video data bank the Video Data Bank (VDB), founded in 1976 and located at the Art Institute of Chicago School, is an American resource for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collects, promotes, distributes, exhibits and preserves the work of video artists. Its website aims to bring their media collections, incorporating video art, digital art and alternative documentary, to a wider community of institutions and individuals. The VDB maintains three collections: 'Early Video Art' contains the first experiments in video art, covering the period 1968-1980; 'Independent Video and Alternative Media' contains works from the 1980s on; 'On Art and Artists' includes video taped interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics. The VDB site provides information on it's collections and access to a large number of QuickTime clips of works within those collections. Works can be accessed via artist name or title. A subject search facility enables items to be located by genre (such as advertisement, documentary, experimental video, pixelvision, music video, TV production) or by the subject of the film (such as The Body, Dance, Politics, Remake). There are also separate lists of anthologies, CD-ROMs, new releases, interviews, compilations and [online] video clips in the collection. Biographies are available for each artist represented in the collection, and a description of each work is also given. A resources section presents an online bibliography on the history of video art, a series of online essays and an extensive links page.

Page feedback

. . .a useful collection of online History of Art resources, Templeman Library, University of Kent, UK

. . .very helpful, staff member at a public library in Rhode Island, USA.

This page is maintained by James G. R. Cronin.