Frick Collection

Libraries and archives in museums have evolved from creating online catalogues and finding aids to digitization projects, which often involve social media interventions and other engagements with the wider public, including crowdsourcing. Beyond collecting or giving access to PDF files and e-books, fewer museum libraries and archives have grappled with the more challenging problems of born-digital art-rich websites. Even fewer museum libraries and archives have begun to exploit the possibilities of digital art history, including visualization, geospatial analysis or computer vision. Museum libraries (and art libraries more generally) have reached a pivot point, where their responsibility will be to explain the possibilities of the digital world to those rooted in the physical, and what can be learned from the physicality of items or collections of items (such as an archive) to the digital native.

There has been a dramatic shift in publication of scholarly art research materials from print to digital formats. In late 2013, the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) was awarded a two-year grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to address challenges of preservation and continued access for future researchers of these materials by implementing a web archiving programme. Due to the transition of many catalogues raisonnés to online from print, born-digital catalogues raisonnés are one of the five key collecting areas of focus for NYARC’s project. The intention of this article is to provide an introduction to the key components of the implementation of NYARC’s web archiving programme, to explore the far-flung implications of the digital shift, and to demonstrate the need for a community of collaboration in building curated web archive collections to benefit the future art historian.

NYARC is a consortium of New York art resources, initially including the libraries of Brooklyn Museum, the Frick Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The Metropolitan was not part of the Arcade (integrated libraries system) programme funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and withdrew its designation as a NYARC entity in December 2010. This article gives a brief history of NYARC and examines whether it achieved its aims of sharing resources, making them more accessible to the public, and saving money.

Recent scholarship has shown that the close reading of hagiographic biographies of local holy people has much to offer to the study of religious life in New Spain.1 Not only do these texts include ...

Girolamo Siciolante has been called a rustic, an eclectic, a Mannerist. In varying degrees, each of these epithets contains some truth, but all are misleading and are tangential to the character and intentions of the artist. For although it cannot be denied that Siciolante was a painter with serious limitations, he is, nevertheless, a figure of considerable interest, and his work helped to shape certain significant trends in mid-sixteenth century Roman painting that generally have been neglected by historians. Indeed, on the whole, our knowledge of Roman painting during the 1540's and 1550's is remarkably incomplete and inaccurate. Siciolante is only one victim of our misconceptions. If a great many errors of attribution and chonology have been committed and perpetuated in the literature on Siciolante, this state of confusion has arisen because none of the personalities active in Rome at the time (with the exception of Michelangelo) has yet been clearly distinguished or defined.

The establishment of an institute for art history in Munich has recently been authorized by the United States Military Government and announced by the Bavarian Ministry of Education. Named the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, this new organization promises to provide an opportunity for German scholars of good repute to take up their studies again. The institute will house most of the available facilities for research to be had in the Munich area, including the majority of the books on art which have survived from the libraries of the city. It is planned that the institute shall serve, not only as a place for scholars to continue their work, but as a kind of graduate school as well, for students who have finished their university training. It will be located in the Central Art Collecting Point in Munich, where a great part of the works of art in this region are stored.