Research Guides: A Guide to Art & Design Resources: Classical Art & Archaeology

Background Information

Encyclopedias, Dictionaries

Oxford Art Online (8 users) A comprehensive and authoritative guide with extensive surveys and in-depth articles on the history of art; provides links to museums, galleries, and art collections around the world, as well as images. Available through this site are Benezit Dictionary of Artists, Grove Art Online, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.

Oxford Bibliographies Online xpert recommendations on the best works available in each discipline; from a chapter, a book, a journal article, a website, an archive, or data set. Each article includes an introduction written by a top scholar in the field.
The Grove encyclopedia of classical art and architecture
EEA: Enciclopedia dell'arte antica, classica e orientale
Art Ref N31 E48
Brill's New Pauly The most complete and most authoritative modern encyclopedia of the classical world. In nearly 20,000 entries it covers two thousand years of history and culture of ancient Greece and Rome, and their reception in the two thousand years that followed. Articles are available in both English and the original German.
The Princeton Enyclopedia of Classical Sites

Books

Art & Architecture ePortal Art and architectural history scholarship from top university press and museum publishers.
WorldCat (FirstSearch Interface)
Catalog of books, journal titles, videos, and materials in libraries worldwide. Use ILLiad link to request.

Classic Catalog
Catalog of all 9 WashU Libraries - primarily physical books, media.

Iconography, Mythology and Symbolism

LIMC: Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (online)
Also: Special Coillections Ref N7760 .L49 1981 (Olin Library, print)
A dictionary of pictorial subjects from classical literature : a guide to their identification in works of art
Art Ref N7760 P68 1983

Articles and Databases

L'Année Philologique Online (1924-) Annual index of scholarly works relating to every aspect of Greek and Roman civilization, including the auxiliary disciplines of archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, papyrology and paleography.
JSTOR Journals, books, images and primary sources.

AWOL: Ancient World Online
Project Dyabola - Archäologische Bibliographie (1956-)
Projekt Dyabola provides access to the regularly updated Archaeological Bibliography, a major, comprehensive bibliographical database for classical archaeology containing book, article and web-based citations from 1956 - present.

Tip: The most effective way to use Dyabola is the Subject Browse feature, combine subject searches and export results. See the attached tips document below.

Dyabola tips

Digital Collections: images, texts, media

Artstor Images from museums and archives around the world that are available for education and research across disciplines. The Artstor platform is no longer available. Existing individual Artstor accounts will carry over to the new JSTOR platform.  To save or download images, users must register for an individual account. Learn more about this database.

Index of Medieval Art (formerly Index of Christian Art) The collections include images and descriptive data related to the iconography of works of art produced between late Antiquity and the sixteenth century. Although the Index of Medieval Art was formerly known as the Index of Christian Art, it now includes secular subjects as well as a growing number of subjects from medieval Jewish and Muslim cultures.
CVA: Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum Online The Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum ('Corpus of Ancient Vases') is the oldest research project of the UAI. It consists of a series of high-quality catalogues of mostly ancient Greek painted pottery in collections around the world. The first fascicule appeared in 1922 and since then more than 400 have appeared, illustrating more than 100,000 vases in 24 countries. The three-year CVA Online project originated in 2000, when Oxford University's Beazley Archive (later the Classical Art Research Centre) was invited to undertake the digitization of out-of-print fascicules. Some further digitization occurred up to 2016 and we continue to add resources when opportunities arise. The digitized catalogues can be viewed and browsed through this site. Their images and selected content are also integrated within CARC's Beazley Archive Pottery Database.
Prometheus Bildarchiv prometheus is a distributed digital image archive that currently makes 3,913,295 images of 128 databases from institutes, research facilities and museums researchable on a common user interface.
Arachne Arachne is the central Object database of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne. Arachne is intended to provide archaeologists and Classicists with a free internet research tool for quickly searching hundreds of thousands of records on objects and their attributes. This combines an ongoing process of digitizing traditional documentation with the production of new digital object and graphic data. Site provides access to an expanding collection of digitized books and photoarchival images relating to objects of Classical antiquity.
Zenon Zenon is the central online catalog of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). Contains open access archaeology bibliographies of the Iberian Peninsula, Eurasia, and the Roman-German Commission.