Tag: research

Categories
Images on the Web News

Digitized Manuscripts from the Vatican Apostolic Library

 

The Vatican Apolostic Library has been working on a project to digitize more than 80,000 documents in its collection. Currently there are nearly 4,500 manuscripts online and there is hope that they’ll have 15,000 manuscripts available by 2018.

The collection features a variety of important and early manuscripts and books, including Pre-Columbian manuscripts, early Greek and Latin texts, Islamic manuscripts, and even some Japanese paintings.

You can browse some of the materials at DigitaVaticana here as well as on the website of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Images can be downloaded from the digital library, but they come with a watermark and copyright statement.

Image: Sandro Botticelli, Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy performed by Lorenzi il Magnifico in the 15th century. Folio 101 recto with a section of the Inferno. Reg.lat.1896A.

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary

Stanford and the BNF Release 14,000 Images of the French Revolution

Stanford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France have partnered on the French Revolution Digital Archive, a collection of more than 14,000 high-resolution images. The archive has two areas of content, including Images, which contains about 12,000 individual images of prints, illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects. The section on Parliamentary Archives contains primary source documents arranged chronologically. Users can browse by date or subject, and search both the Images and Parliamentary Archives sections at once or individually. The project also contains an excellent timeline of the Revolution.

For more information, check out the French Revolution Digital Archive!

Via Hyperallergic

Categories
News Photography

Hundreds of Images of Historic London Published for First Time

The archives manager at Bishopsgate Institute recently discovered boxes containing more than 3,000 slides depicting London’s landmarks including churches, statues, buildings, and social scenes from the Victorian period to the early 20th century.

In 2007, a project to digitize the images launched, some of which can be seen here. More than 600 images were digitized, and in October 2013 were published in a book called The Gentle Author’s London Album.

For more information, visit the Spitalfield’s page on the album. To view a sampling of images, visit the ITV News article about the project.

Image: Traffic on Tower Bridge, 1905 Credit: Bishopsgate Institute

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary Museums News Photography

Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Makes Gift of Shunk and Kender Archives

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation recently announced that it is donating nearly 200,000 items from the Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender Archives to five international institutions. The archival materials include black-and-white prints, color prints, negatives, contact sheets, and color transparencies, and will be distributed to the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of the Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tate. The Foundation’s gift marks the first time an artist’s foundation has devoted its resources to the work of other artists.

Harry Shunk (1924–2006, born in Germany) and János [Jean] Kender (1937–2009, born in Hungary) made the bulk of their images from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, documenting more than 400 artists in their studios, at openings, and during performances, making this collection an important documentary collection of the modern art and art history. Artists depicted include Roy Lichtenstein, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Alexander Calder, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Man Ray, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol among many others.

After Shunk died in 2006, the Foundation began acquiring the archive by purchase between 2008 and 2012. After acquiring the images, the Foundation “preserved, cataloged, and digitized the images” and made them available in an online collection on their website. You can view the archive’s list of artists to view PDFs of thumbnails that depict that specific artist. For information about using the images in scholarly publications, contact Shunk-Copyright@lichtensteinfoundation.org.

For more information or to check out the collection, visit the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Photography Archives.

Via ArtDaily.

Categories
Modern - Contemporary

Contemporary Artists Index

The Cleveland Institute of Art recently redesigned and improved the functionality of the Contemporary Artists Index, a fantastic resource that documents artists, artist groups, photographers, craftspeople, designers, and design firms. The Index now contains more than 31,000 artists appearing in more than 1,800 exhibition catalogs and art publications.

Categories
Photography VRC

Luminous Lint

Luminous Lint is an expansive photography resource that includes images and text about historic and contemporary photographic practice, as well as artist biographies, styles and movements, thematic content, information about printing techniques and processes, and chronological information about the history of the medium.

The website also features images of artworks as well as artists’ monographs, making it a great starting place to research photographers or photographic movements.

For more information, check out Luminous Lint!

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology Museums

Penn Museum’s Digital Resources for Archaeology and Anthropology

The Penn Museum in Philadelphia, the University of Pennslyvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, recently launched two new digital endeavors for researchers.

The newly revamped Collections Database includes more than 690,000 objects and more than 95,000 images. The database records are robust, with links to related objects and bibliographic citations of where the image has been published.

The Penn Museum also allows users to download data files of its object records under a Creative Commons license. You can download datasets on all objects or by cultural group, including African, American, Asian, Egyptian, European, Historic, Mediterranean, Near Eastern, and Oceanian. The datasets include physical information, its provenance, and materialiaty but not images of the objects and the objects’ publication and exhibition histories.

The Research Map and Timeline provides interactive documentation and information about the museum’s research expeditions and projects since the 1880s. Users can browse projects geographically or chronologically, and the website provides a record of the dates, researchers, and time period studied as well as a brief description of the work done and key discoveries.

Via ArtDaily

Categories
Images on the Web Renaissance - Baroque VRC

Hand-Colored De Bry Engravings of 1590

Picturing the New World: The Hand-Colored De Bry Engravings of 1590 is a resource from UNC Libraries that presents the digitized engravings Theodore De Bry (1528–98) illustrated for A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. These hand-colored engravings were based on the watercolors of John White, who became part of the first British colony in North America, which was established off the coast of what is now North Carolina in 1585. Although the colonists were only there for about a year, White painted the environment and people of North America.

In 1588, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia was published, containing stories and descriptions about the new land. De Bry worked directly from John White’s watercolors to create 27 engravings for the illustrated edition to create what would be the first published images of Native Americans. However, the digital collection notes:

While the De Bry engravings shown on this site represent the earliest published images of Native Americans, viewers should be careful not to interpret these as accurate depictions of the inhabitants of North Carolina in the late sixteenth century. The images shown here are twice removed from John White’s original watercolors. In the engravings created by Theodore De Bry, there are many subtle but significant changes from White’s originals: the facial structure of most of the people has been altered, resulting in portraits that look more like Europeans; the musculature on most of the people is much more defined in the De Bry engravings; and the poses of many of the subjects seem to reflect classical statuary. The colorist for this volume has contributed to the distortion of the original images by adding a pale skin tone and blonde hair to some of the people and decorating much of the vegetation in colors that are unlike anything that occurs naturally in this part of the world.

For more information and to explore the digital collection, visit Picturing the New World: The Hand-Colored De Bry Engravings of 1590.

 

Categories
Images on the Web Renaissance - Baroque

Italian Renaissance Learning Resources

Oxford University Press’s Grove Art Online and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, have created a new web module called Italian Renaissance Learning Resources with the support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The module features eight units that provide thematic access to the art of the Italian Renaissance: Virgin and Child, Picturing Family and Friends, The Making of an Artist, a New World of Learning, Presentation of Self, Time and Narrative, Recovering the Golden Age, and Artists and Patrons. The eight units are can be cross-searched, and essays are presented for each theme. The website features more than 340 images as well as a host of other educational resources, including selections from primary source texts (transcribed but not digitally reproduced), a glossary, as well as discussion questions and activities for classroom use.

For more information, visit the Italian Renaissance Learning Resources.

Categories
Images on the Web Photography

University of Chicago Photographic Archive

The University of Chicago Photographic Archive has a digital collection that contains images from five series encompassing the University’s history, including individuals and groups, buildings and grounds, events, student activities, sports, the Yerkes observatory, and the Chicago Maroon student newspaper.

This is a great resource for school pride and nostalgia and also a stellar resource for studying the development of campus architecture.

Image credit: Cochrane Woods Art Center I. University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf02108, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.