Image Databases for Art-related Research : Home

ARTstor provides over 1.8 million digital images in the arts, architecture, and humanities. Collections include image contributions from museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists' estates. Users can search for images by keyword or browse images by geography, classification or collection. Registered users may print or download images.
Available to anyone on-campus. Available off campus for UW Madison students, faculty and staff only.

Chazen Museum Collections is the online database documenting objects owned by the Chazen Museum, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Updated periodically, the individual database records may contain thumbnail images of the artwork and supplementary information such as exhibition histories and bibliography when available.
Available to everyone.

This database provides access to over 4.6 million photographs from the Associated Press news organization, dating from 1826 to moments ago. Also included are graphics, audio files and more. (Updated continuously)
Available to anyone on-campus. Available off campus for UW Madison students, faculty and staff only.

Database of about 2 million images of art and architecture from 13 countries in Europe. Images are from about 80 partners, including museums and cultural heritage agencies, research institutions and individual photographers. The majority of the images derive from the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

With images from over 8,000 collections and more than 29,000 artists, Bridgeman represents international museums, galleries and artists by providing a central source of fine art for image users. Every subject, concept, style and medium is represented, from national museums to private collections. Fine art is just one of the sources of images; design, antiques, maps, architecture, furniture, glass, ceramics, anthropological artefacts and many others also feature in the collection.
Available to anyone on-campus. Available off campus for UW Madison students, faculty and staff only.

The Index of Christian Art provides text descriptions and bibliographic references for over 75,000 works of Early Christian and Medieval art in 17 media, created from early apostolic times to 1400. (Additional holdings being added will extend the date range for manuscripts to the sixteenth century.) Extensive thematic and iconographic indexing is also provided. Approximately 100,000 are linked for viewing, and citations are given for published sources of reproductions, if known. The online database is a portion of the 200,000-item indexed picture file compiled at Princeton University. Three copies of the complete index exist and may be consulted at: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C.; Getty Research Center, Los Angeles; and Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht. (Updated annually)
Available to anyone on-campus. Available off campus for UW Madison students, faculty and staff only.

The Perseus Project is an evolving digital library of resources for the study of the humanities. It consists of materials, textual and visual, on the Archaic and Classical Greek world--including an Art & Archaeology Artifact Browser with images of art objects, sites, and buildings. Additionally, Perseus has expanded into other literary and historical collections ranging from the English Renaissance to the American Civil War. (Updates vary)
Available to everyone.

This collection from the New York Public Library contains 30,000 digitized, public domain images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923. It is searchable by keyword, or by browsing a variety of indexes. (Not updated) NOTE: A successor collection, NYPL Digital Collections, is larger but less focused.
Available to everyone.

This scholarly collection documents the entire spectrum of underground and independent North American and European comics and graphic novels, with 75,000 pages of original material from the 1950s to today along with more than 25,000 pages of interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism from journals, books, and magazines, including The Comics Journal. (Content still being added)
Available to anyone on-campus. Available off campus for UW Madison students, faculty and staff only.

This database provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project which contains approximately 100,000 images of global art and architecture. The images can be searched or browsed from organized thematic portfolios. (Updates vary)
Available to everyone.

This online streaming film collection delivers over 500 hours of documentaries and interviews illustrating the theory and practice of a variety of art forms and providing the context necessary for critical analysis. The collection spans period and region, including coverage of the Renaissance, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Modern, and Contemporary art. In addition to art history and theory, the collection addresses applied topics such as architectural and graphic design.
Available to anyone on-campus. Available off campus for UW Madison students, faculty and staff only.