All Things Visual: The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center

An exhibition of documents at Rome’s State Archives throws vivid light on his tumultuous life here at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries.

…He had frequent brushes with the police, got into trouble for throwing a plate of cooked artichokes in the face of a waiter in a tavern, and made a hole in the ceiling of his rented studio, so that his huge paintings would fit inside. His landlady sued, so he and a friend pelted her window with stones.

To explore an interactive sample of the documents, see the recent article from BBC News.

Via Open Culture:

This past week, an Italian web site (Haltadefinizione) placed online six masterpieces from the famous Uffizi Gallery in Florence, all in super high resolution. Each image is packed with close to 28 billion pixels, a resolution 3,000 times greater than your normal digital photo. And this gives art connaisseurs everywhere the ability to zoom in and explore these paintings in exquisitely fine detail – to see strokes and details not normally seen even by visitors to the Uffizi.

These digital reproductions will be available online for free until January 29, 2011.

According to a recent BBC News article:

Human remains found in a church in Tuscany almost certainly belong to Renaissance artist Caravaggio, Italian researchers said… Researchers used DNA and carbon dating to make their findings.

Scientists now hope a proper burial will be provided for the Italian Baroque painter, but first the remains will be put on display. 2010 marks the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio’s death.

Now you can (virtually) tour the Sistine Chapel via your computer screen, thanks to a project from Villanova University of Pennsylvania. Created in consultation with the Vatican, this QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) tour of the Sistine Chapel facilitates study of the frescoes and architecture in a new way.

“Villanova students and faculty from the University’s communication and computing science departments spent five nights in a closed Sistine Chapel, gathering images from every corner of the chapel, including Michelangelo’s famous artwork on the chapel ceiling and large fresco, The Last Judgment, on the sanctuary wall. This was the most extensive access ever granted by the Vatican to an outside group.” For more information, see the press release from Villanova University.

In honor of April Fools’ Day, here’s a look at the basilica dedicated to the notorious holy fool Saint Francis. Sacred Destinations–an online guide to sacred sites, religious art & architecture, and historic religious places–features a comprehensive virtual tour of the Basilica di San Francesco, Assisi, including frescoes by Giotto.

Timelines: Sources from History, available on the British Library’s website, allows you to explore British Library collection items chronologically. It includes items from the medieval period to the present, and a diverse array of items from everyday life (handbills, posters, diaries) and from political events (charters, speeches, campaign leaflets).

Credo Reference, the award winning online reference library, now includes National Gallery London images in the Credo General Reference Collection. Credo Reference is available through the University of Chicago library by clicking here.

Credo has licensed high resolution images of the paintings in the National Gallery. Students and faculty can now easily find quality images from this museum to aid their research. This page includes a browsable list of the National Gallery images available through Credo.

Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi of Great Britain Collection
ARTstor is collaborating with the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi of Great Britain [CVMA (GB)] and the National Monuments Record, the public archive at English Heritage, to distribute approximately 18,000 images of medieval stained glass windows from Great Britain in the Digital Library.
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Renaissance and Baroque architecture and sculpture from the Ralph Lieberman Archive (Harvard University)
Harvard University is collaborating with ARTstor to digitize and distribute approximately 3,500 images of Renaissance and Baroque architecture and sculpture photographed by Ralph Lieberman. A majority of the images document architecture and sculpture in Italy, but the collection will also include sites in other European countries, such as Germany and Spain.
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To open ARTstor, click here. If you register for an account, you can log in to ARTstor from anywhere you please. Learn how to register

From ARTstor:

 

We are pleased to announce that the Jessica E. Smith and Kevin R. Brine Charitable Trust has given ARTstor a grant to build a themed collection on the story of Judith and Holofernes. This collection will be part of a larger project – The Judith Project – commissioned by the donor to enhance scholarship on The Book of Judith and its later lexical and iconographical traditions in Western culture from antiquity to the present.

Read more…

From ARTstor.org:

• Images from the Mark Rothko Family Collection
  ARTstor is pleased to announce the first release of images to the Mark Rothko Collection in the ARTstor Digital Library. This release includes 43 paintings scanned from eight-by-ten color transparencies not previously in public collections. Learn more
• Ghiberti collection completed
  We are pleased to announce that we have just released the final 30 images of the Ghiberti collection, depicting the cleaned Noah panel. Along with the previously added images of the partially cleaned panel, these images further underscore the importance of the recent restoration campaign and its photographic documentation by ARTstor. Learn more