Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Index of Christian Art

The Index of Christian Art has just launched three new resources for the medievalist which contain over 25,000 images. The first of these is a database of some six thousand images of medieval-mainly Romanesque art which were taken by a Swiss couple who wish to remain anonymous. The collection of digitized slides covers France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and The Netherlands. Cursory cataloguing accompanies these images which are more fully analyzed in the Index database proper. The url is http://ica.princeton.edu/romanesque/index.php The second resource is The Lois Drewer Database. When she died some five months ago she left the Index of Christian Art a large and unsorted collection of slides which covered many countries she visited throughout her lifetime. Her wide interest in art and architecture is reflected in this collection which spans landscape and garden design to archaeological sites in the Near East, to Romanesque and Gothic architecture to a considerable focus on Renaissance architecture. Her travels brought her to Austria, Crete, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Libya, the Netherlands, Spain, Syria, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. It is slightly ironical that some of the weakest areas to be represented in this collection are the medieval and Byzantine worlds! Again, cursory cataloguing accompanies these images which are low resolution jpg files. The url for this site is http://ica.princeton.edu/drewer/index.php The third resource is the first installment of images from a collaborative venture the Index entered into with the Bibliotheque Gabriel Millet in the Sorbonne, Paris. This is to catalogue the entire archive of Byzantine art that was first started in 1903. As it presently stands, the database contains nearly all of the slides (approximately 15,000) in the archive. It is hoped that these will be extended over time with the addition of the glass plate negatives and prints. Enquiries regarding this database should be addressed to Catherine Jolivet-Lévy at catjolivet@yahoo.fr. Images from this resources are not available from the Index. The url for this resource is http://ica.princeton.edu/millet/index.php

1 comment:

Christian Art said...

Christian Art is true Art.A great way to show our faith is the types of paintings or sayings that we have on our walls.