Online Image Collections for the U of C community
- Aluka: An international, collaborative initiative building an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa. Three collections are currently under development: African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes, African Plants, and Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa. New materials are added to the collections on an ongoing basis.
- Artnet: Sale results and images for individual lots sold at major auction houses since 1990. Database includes paintings, sculpture, and works on paper. Records are searchable by either artist's name or auction house; no subject or keyword searching is available at ths time.
- ARTstor: Searchable database of more than 300,000 digital images. ARTstor covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design, as well as forms of visual culture. Users can search, view, and download images.
- Bridgeman Art Library Archive is part of Credo Reference, a composite of many books and born-digital materials. The image database comprises a "large part" of the entire Bridgeman image collection.
- CAMIO: The Catalog of Art Museum Images online is a database of images of works of art contributed by museums in the United States, Canada and Great Britain. The scope of the database covers prehistory to the present, with works from Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. Included are paintings, sculptures, drawings, textiles, photographs, prints, costumes and jewelry, works of decorative art, books and manuscripts. CAMIO is the replacement for AMICO, which was phased out in July, 2005.
- Index of Christian Art: Indexes works of art from early apostolic times to A.D. 1400, with an emphasis on art of the western world. Seventeen media are represented in the archive, including manuscripts, metalwork, sculpture, painting, and glass. Records include bibliography, references to reproductions and, in some cases, links to images.
- Saskia Image Collection: 30,000 images of paintings, sculpture and architecture from important collections including the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Louvre, the Prado and the Uffizi, as well as archeological sites in Greece, Turkey, Italy and Egypt.
- Visual Resource Collections: The Department of Art History's teaching resources are searchable in both LUNA and ARTstor.
Free-access online images:
- Art Images for College Teaching A collection of images of art and architectural works in the public domain, distributed on a free-access, free-use basis. Emphasis on ancient, medieval, and the Renaissance in Europe, as most 20th-century works have copyright restrictions. Hosted by the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota.
- Bridgeman Art Library: This is the complete stock photo archive. It includes coverage of contemporary and historical periods, fine arts and artifacts, and offers useful search features. With over 100,000 images from collections around the world, the size of the database makes it helpful for locating and identifying images. This is the commercial site; purchase or download images for a fee.
- Life Magazine Photo Archive is a subset of Goggle Images. Images are organized by decade, and searchable in Google using this syntax: xxxx source:life. For example, university of chicago source:life.
- New York Public Library Digital Gallery An excellent and growing database of 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, and printed ephemera.
- The Historic Architecture and Landscape image collection, maintained by the Art Institute of Chicago, comprises more than 11,000 images of projects by Chicago-area architects, and is searchable by architect, project name, location, view and more.
- Oriental Institute Museum Photographic Archives: A sampling of over 1000 images from the photographic archives of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, focusing especially on Persepolis and Ancient Iran. The archives document the Institute's expeditions and activities from 1892 to the present.
- Oxford Portraits From Oxford University's extensive portrait collections, images of paintings, drawings, sculpture, medals and photographs by celebrated artists and others of significance dating from 1450s to the present.
- Perseus Project Digital Library: Database of visual and textual resources for the study of Archaic and Classical Greece. Searchable catalogs of architecture, sites, coins, vases and sculpture from selected museums include images and documentation.
- Photograph and Image Sources in the Sciences, from the University of Chicago's John Crerar Library. Here you'll find links leading to collections of images related to the fields of ecology, physics, astronomy, history of medicine, and chemistry.
- Smart Museum Online Database Project: Searchable database of records for over 3100 images of objects in the Smart Museum collection.
- The Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae Digital Collection In 1540 Antonio Lafreri began publishing maps and other printed images depicting monuments and antiquities of ancient Rome. After the mid-1570s, collections of these prints came to be known as the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, the "Mirror of Roman Magnificence." This site presents the Univeristy of Chicago's collection of 994 Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae engravings dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
- World Digital Library A UNESCO-supported database containing digital maps, prints, books, journals, motion pictures and sound recordings about its nearly 200 member states . Narrow results by country, time period, contributiing institution and more.
