Art & Architecture: Background Info
This guide offers resources and starting points for researchers in art history, digital scholarship, and visual culture.
Timelines, Dictionaries, and Directories
TIP: When researching an artist, make to use the correct form of the artist's name. There may be variant forms of the artist's name in different sources (especially if you are looking in English-language sources and the name is transliterated from a language with a different alphabet). Also, be aware of nicknames! The Getty's Union List of Artist Names (see below) is a good place to start if you're not sure what name you should use in your search.
- Heilbrunn Timeline of ArtCompiled by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's curatorial, conservation, and education staff, covers pre-history to the present day. Contents arranged chronologically, geographically, and thematically
- Oxford Art OnlineProvides a single portal for searching across several major art encyclopedias and dictionaries, including Grove Art Online, Benezit Dictionary of Artists, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. Entries include bibliographies for further research, images, and often examples of artists' signatures.
- Getty's Union List of Artist NamesEach artist record includes biographical information, names (including given names, pseudonyms, variant spellings, married names, etc., with one name flagged as the preferred name), related artists, notes, and citations. Covers antiquity to the present; international in scope.
- NMWA: Artist ProfilesFrom the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Browse artists by last name.
Biographical Dictionaries & Encyclopedias
Biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias provide biographical data (such as birth and death dates and lists of works), bibliographies and essays that are authored by experts in the field.
- Oxford Art OnlineProvides a single portal for searching across several major art encyclopedias and dictionaries, including Grove Art Online, Benezit Dictionary of Artists, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. Entries include bibliographies for further research, images, and often examples of artists' signatures.
- Allgemeines KünstlerlexikonA world biographical dictionary of artists.
- Biography and Genealogy Master IndexPoints to places to find biographical information for over 5 million people, living and dead. Biography and Genealogy Master Index indexes various editions of over 700 biographical reference sources, both current and retrospective, that cover historical as well as contemporary figures. Examples of sources indexed would include many of the "Who's Who" indexes, a number of the "Oxford Companions," and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. A complete list of sources and editions is given in the appendix accompanying the documentation.
- Union List of Artists' Names (ULAN)A registry of nearly 640,000 names and other information about artists, produced by the Getty Research Institute. Each entry includes biographical and bibliographic information on the artist.
Iconography & Symbolism
- Hutchinson Dictionary of SymbolsBrief entries on secular and religious symbols.
- Encyclopedia of Comparative IconographyFocuses on themes from iconographic narratives (biblical, mythical & literary). Substantial entries include selected examples of art work and further reading.
- The complete dictionary of symbols : in myth, art and literatureCovering classical and other mythologies, biblical themes and the world of traditional symbols from cultures worldwide, this is a guide to more than 2000 major themes, figures and symbols that have been most commonly encountered from ancient times to the present day.
Pronounciation Guides
- European artists, 15th-20th centuryFrom inogolo, which hosts a number of various pronunciation guides.
Oval Portrait of a Woman
Oval portrait of a woman in a Chaghtai hat, c. 1740-50, India, Mughal, 18th century, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art
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