Art History: Online Sources

Index of Christian Art (ICA) database contains more than 80,000 records and over 130,000 images, coverning not only art of the western world, but also from the Near East. Media represented: illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, painting, ivories, metalwork, and glass. The Index of Christian Art was founded by Professor Charles Rufus Morey (1877-1955) in 1917. At the time of Morey's death, the Index had a collection of some 500,000 cards and about 100,000 photographs. The Index currently provides access to complex information on approximately 200,000 photographic reproductions of Christian art in the east and west from early apostolic times up to A.D. 1400. Computerization of the Index began in 1991. Addition of photographs to the manual files continues, however, the text records for such works are now only available in the electronic version. Three copies of the Index are available for consultation in Europe and North America: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C.; Getty Research Center, Los Angeles; Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht. These copies, as well as the original Index at Princeton, are updated and extended every year. All copies replicate in every detail the holdings of the parent site in Princeton. Restricted to subscribers, the electronic version of the database contains approximately 30% of the files which were developed over the years but which are being extended on a weekly basis. Of the 130,000 images, around 40,000 are restricted and can not be viewed via the online database. All images have a bibliographic reference to published images. At the present, images can not be downloaded or printed from the ICA database.