History of Art & Architecture

Artstor is a nonprofit digital library of more than 2.5 million images representing the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences. In addition, many images from the Fine Arts Library Visual Collections and from the Visual Collections of the Frances Loeb Library are available in Artstor’s Harvard Study Collections.

Associated Press archive of over photographs from 1844 to the present, audio files of radio broadcasts, text of wire stories, and info-graphics. Good resource for photojournalism.

Archnet is an expanding library with over 153,000 records for sites, cities, individuals, firms, media and pedagogical material focused on the built environment of Muslim societies. Click the links on this page to explore some recently published site and authority records.

Bridgeman Art Library offers keyword searching and display of its collection of over 350,000 art images from more than 8,000 major international museums, galleries, auction houses, and other collections. Publication and projection quality images are available from Bridgeman Art Library for a fee.

Harvard University Library Digital Collections showcases selected digital image collections created from unique Harvard Library holdings across a broad range of disciplines and cultural history worldwide.

Europeana.eu contains approximately 6 million digital items captured from paintings, sound recordings, films, and texts from Europe's galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Included are works of art, maps, photos, books, newspapers, letters, diaries, archival papers, music and spoken word, videos, films, newsreels, and TV and radio broadcasts.

Contains a growing number of digital images from the Frick Photoarchive, a study collection of more than 1 million photographic reproductions of works of art by fourth to mid-twentieth century artists trained in the Western tradition. Each photograph is accompanied by historical documentation that traces the essential elements of the biography of a work of art — changes of attribution, ownership, and condition.

The Getty Search Gateway allows users to search across several of the Getty repositories, including collections databases, library catalogs, collection inventories, and archival finding aids. It is listed here for the vast collection digital images included.

This collection documents architecture around the world and across history documents more than a thousand buildings and hundreds of leading architects and includes 3D models, photographic images and architectural drawings, commentaries, bibliographies, web links, and more, for famous designers and structures.

Collections Online provides access to basic information about every object on exhibition in HAM galleries as well as many more works of art in HAM collections. Digital images are included for most objects. Additional documentation on individual works of art is available from the Harvard Art Museums.

HOLLIS Images is the Harvard Library's dedicated image catalog. It includes content from archives, museums, libraries, and other collections throughout Harvard University documenting the arts, material culture, and social history. HOLLIS Images contains descriptive records and images representing paintings, sculpture, photography, drawings, prints, architecture, decorative arts, trade cards, rubbings, theater designs, maps and plans. High resolution images may be downloaded.

The Index of Medieval Art online database includes images and descriptive data relating to works of art produced between early apostolic times and the sixteenth century. Although the Index of Medieval Art was formerly known as the Index of Christian Art, the collection now includes secular subjects as well as a growing number of subjects from medieval Jewish and Islamic culture. About half of the total records held in the Index are currently online; back-files and new material are added regularly.

The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog provides public access to catalog records and over 1.2 million digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and other units of the Library of Congress. The collections include photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings. While international in scope, the collections are particularly rich in materials related to the history of the United States and the lives of the American people.

Contains approximately one million photographic reproductions. Covers all media: art, architecture, furniture, paintings, drawings, manuscripts, reliefs, facades, portals, glass, ceramics, sculpture, mosaics, collages, etc., from medieval to present-day Germany. In German and English.

Peabody Museum Collections Online provides access to the Peabody Museum's database for objects, paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs. The Peabody's Online Database offers access to over 400,000 records and images. The site offers users the opportunity to browse preselected groups of commonly requested objects, a simple search function, and an advanced search function. Additional options for researchers are available on request.

Prometheus is a digital image archive for art and culture. Prometheus provides a common user interface that allow searching across multiple image archives, databases from art history research institutes, and museums, primarily in Germany. Content includes over 100 art history, design, architectural, theological, history and archaeological image databases containing more than 2 million images. Create a profile to save and edit images for presentation.

Search more than 5 million images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other resources from all of the Smithsonian's museums, archives & libraries. Included are more than 10,000 photographs, letters, sketches and sketchbooks, diaries, printed materials, ephemera, and other documents representing Archives of American Art collections.

WorldImages provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains over 100,000 digital images which may be freely used for educational purposes. The images can be located using multiple search indexes and are organized into over 900 subject grouping portfolios.