Art + Design Research Guide

The archives of the American Institute for Graphic Arts (AIGA) have thousands of images, including entries from their annual juried design competition, which started in 1924.

The AAT is a structured vocabulary of around 34,000 concepts, including 131,000 terms, descriptions, bibliographic citations, and other information relating to fine art, architecture, decorative arts, archival materials, and material culture.

This database presents a digital collection of historical content pertaining to U.S. Hispanic history, literature and culture. “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project” – from which the collections draws its content, is the largest national project ever to locate, preserve and disseminate Hispanic culture of the United States in its written form since colonial times until 1960.

Bad at Sports is a weekly podcast produced in Chicago that features artists talking about art and the community that makes, reviews and critiques it.

BHA is the most comprehensive art bibliography available worldwide, covering European and American visual arts from late antiquity to 2009

The online collection allows access to almost four and a half million objects in more than two million records encompassing some of the earliest objects created by humankind to works by contemporary artists.

An an interdisciplinary research database containing documentation centering on the reception of antiquity, a focus of Renaissance studies. The antique monuments known in the Renaissance are registered together with related Renaissance documents (texts and images), and information about locations, persons, periods, and bibliographic data. The Census is useful for art history and archaeology research, and for understanding the afterlife of antiquity.

Biographic and demographic information on close to 18,000 historic and contemporary women artists from around the world (National Museum of Women in the Arts).

The Europeana website provides cultural heritage enthusiasts, professionals, teachers, and researchers with access to Europe's digital cultural heritage. Why? To inspire and inform fresh perspectives and open conversations about our history and culture. We rely on the thousands of European providing institutions, like galleries, libraries, archives, and museums that share our belief that access to cultural heritage is transformational - it empowers people and benefits society as a whole.

Featuring over 1,700 artworks by more than 625 artists, the Collection Online presents a searchable database of selected artworks from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection of approximately 8,000 artworks dating from the late 19th century to the present.

Discover the story of art and global culture through The Met collection. Explore more than 1,000 essays on a wide range of topics, including artists, materials, movements, and themes; browse a selection of more than 8,000 works from the collection, and use the chronologies to trace the global evolution of art and culture across millennia.

HENI Talks is dedicated to sharing insights about art history on film from leading artists, curators and academics. This growing catalogue of short films aims to open art up to the wider public, and create a platform through which everyone can learn about art history, and can discuss, comment, enjoy and engage with it.

This is a collection available from the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History.
Iconclass is a classification system designed for art and iconography. It is the most widely accepted scientific tool for the description and retrieval of subjects represented in images (works of art, book illustrations, reproductions, photographs, etc.) and is used by museums and art institutions around the world.

Previously known as Index of Christian Art, this database indexes medieval art in books, manuscripts, and photographs (Princeton University). Records works of art produced without geographical limitations from early apostolic times up to A.D. 1400. Focuses on art of the western world. Seventeen different media are represented in the archive, including manuscripts, metalwork, sculpture, painting, glass, etc. Search for musical instruments, musical notation, other music-related terms using Find searches.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents over 5,000 years of art from around the world

The masterworks highlighted here represent only a small part of the more than 150,000 sculptures, decorative arts, prints, drawings, photographs, and paintings in the National Gallery’s permanent collection

The museum addresses the gender imbalance in the presentation of art by bringing to light important women artists of the past while promoting great women artists working today.

The collection contains 30,000 digital images of paintings, sculpture and architecture, including images from many important collections: the Prado, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Uffizi, and the Louvre as well as archaeological sites in Greece, Italy, Turkey and Egypt. The images can be displayed and downloaded in high-resolution format.

A free, authoritative multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook.

This Gallery is meant to be a landing page for interested researchers to explore some of the many digitized collections held at the Smithsonian. You can explore by Arts & Design, History & Culture, or by individual Smithsonian repositories and museums.

The V&A is the world’s leading museum of art and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects, books and archives that span over 5,000 years of human creativity. The museum holds many of the UK's national collections and houses some of the greatest resources for the study of architecture, furniture, fashion, textiles, photography, sculpture, painting, jewelry, glass, ceramics, book arts, Asian art and design, theatre and performance.

WikiArt's primary goal is to make world’s art accessible to anyone and anywhere. WikiArt already features some 250.000 artworks by 3.000 artists, localized on 7 languages. These artworks are in museums, universities, town halls, and other civic buildings of more than 100 countries.