Favorite Online Art Research Sites
Here is a collection of sites that I find very useful in doing art research, some of them are in English and some of them are not. For the ones that aren’t, I have written a little guide for each on how to use the search functions, even when you haven’t the slightest clue what the words are saying.
Art Research Sites
These are sites that combine paintings from many different museums into a complete whole. Individual museums are covered below.
Artcyclopedia The Guide to Fine Art on the Internet This is my first stop when looking for an artists paintings. Very comprehensive and informative as well as being easy to use.
Web Gallery of Art What more can I say? I love this site, its easy to use and the search tools are awesome!!! You can search by author, text, timeline, school, form, type and location, or any combo of the above. It also has a nice selection of German artists (Cranach et all) and the ability to zoom into the image and see details up close. Most images are in color.
Bildarchiv der Kunst und Architektur This site contains pictures and information on every museum in Germany. It is THE place for all things German. I wrote a whole extra page on it, you can find it here at Guide to Bildindex
REALonline the Austrian version of Bildindex.de, except with more color pictures, vastly better indexing and a much faster user interface. It has over 14,000 works of art, many of which have detail images, that are available for viewing online and they have been tagged with catalogue entries in 13 available catalogues. I’ve written a help guide for it as well,
Ministère de la culture – joconde Louvre Search – This website searches all of the holdings of every museum in France. It is THE place for French paintings and Clouet portraits.
Online Art Books
Die Augsburger Monatsbilder
Not technically a book, but a set of 4 murals done in Augsburg, Germany in the 1520’s. There is a mural for each season, and each mural depicts three months out of the year, depicting activities done in each month. These murals give a glimpse of the clothing and hats worn by a wide spectrum of social classes in Augsburg. Here is Winter,Spring,Summer, Fall. . The whole thing is luscious eye candy, worthy of drooling over and going in for the close ups.
Das Hausbuch der Mendelschen Zwölfbrüderstiftung zu Nürnberg A series of simple ink sketches showing craftsman in Nurnberg during the late 1400’s to early 1500’s.
Digital Archive of Documents and Books Related to Lace A nice resource for online lace and embroidery books that cover the 1600’s.
My Gracious Silence This is a great online resource, has the entire Im Frauwenzimmer Frauen-Trachtbuch with engravings by Jost Amman, online and able to be viewed close up.
Bibliotheca Palatina– Illuminated German manuscripts
Inventory-Catalogue of Ambrosiana Drawings
Online Museum Collections
National Gallery of Art – Search (Collection and Site) Great site, wonderful museum. Can search the collection using one or more of the following criteria: artist name, title key words, school, style, creation date, and medium. Doesn’t have the complete collection online, which is a pity.
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco The Thinker ImageBase Part of the Triumph of Maximillian is webbed here.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Has a good search engine, unfortunatly most of the portraits are in black and white.
V&A Access to Images Online access to images of articles in the V&A Museum in London. Not the easiest database to find things in, but there’s some very good stuff in there.
VIRTUELLES KUNSTMUSEUM Nice search engine and quite a few Holbein, older and younger and the brother.
Search Guide: Chose Sammlung (Collection) from the menu, then you have a chose of either Epochen (Epoch, timeframe) or Kunstler (Artist).
If you chose Kunstler you get a list of all of the artists in the collection by last name.
If you chose Epochen, you get a timeline to chose from. Kunst des 15/16. Jhs equates to the 15th and 16th centuries, which is the time period that I am interested in. This gives you a listing of the artists in the collection who were active during that time
British Museum Compass Home Page
Corsair – Online Pierpont Morgan Library
Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg This is the website for the GNM, but all the good stuff is in Bildindex.
Louvre Museum Official Website This is the official website of the Louvre, Joconde is easier to search, but you can browse the museum by gallery here.
Virtual Uffizi. The Complete Catalogue. Florence, Italy
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