Martin Carlin, writing table, c. 1778. Getty Centre, Los Angeles. Source: James, Flickr (edited). Licence.
General
These resources are relevant to more than one medium and more than one time period.
Archives of American Art: digital collections
Primary material relating to the history of American art, digitised for online viewing.
Art & Architecture Thesaurus Online
Definitions of art terms, and synonyms in English and other languages.
Art & the Country House
Art collections in selected British country houses. Offers collection databases, digitised historical documents and thematic essays from various perspectives, including the postcolonial and feminist. From the Paul Mellon Centre.
ART-Dok
Journal articles on art history. Much German content as well as articles in English.
Art Signature Dictionary
Images of 40,000 artists' signatures, monograms and symbols. Signatures can also be found in Benezit.
ARTbibliographies Modern and the Bibliography of the History of Art
Databases, with overlapping coverage, for finding citations to journal articles on western art published since 1973. The text of the articles themselves is not included. OpenBibArt is a new and apparently similar database, offering coverage of earlier articles too.
Fondazione Federico Zeri Photo Archive Catalog
290,000 photos of artworks, notably Italian paintings. Includes information on provenance and alternative attributions
Not Your Grandfather's Art History: A BIPOC Reader
'Digital reader of art history essays authored largely by scholars who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color).' US-based.
RKD (Netherlands Institute of Art History)
Large database of book titles, article titles, images and more, especially useful for researching Dutch art.
Union List of Artist Names
Names and other basic information about artists. Useful for checking the different names and variants artists have been known by.
VADS
Image database divided into collections from diverse sources, many relevant to MAFDAD.
Decorative arts
Antique Jewelry University
Not a university, but a large and informative website including a guide to jewelry makers' marks.
Silver Marks, Hallmarks & Makers' Marks
Old masters
Modernism: design
Gallica
Very large collection of books and other material uploaded by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Almost all material is in French. However you can search for material in a specific language, and the website itself can be viewed in several different languages.
Modernism: fine art
Images
Provenance, collecting and authenticity