AH 4610 Senior Seminar

The Digital Art History Lab (DAHL) seeks to provide art historians with the digital tools and data necessary to explore new methodologies. It also aims to stimulate collaborations between art historians and specialists from a variety of fields, from computer science to historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts and their various histories through its expertise, active collecting program, public programs, institutional collaborations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and residential scholars programs. Its Research Library and Special Collections of rare materials and digital resources serve an international community of scholars and the interested public. The Institute's activities and scholarly resources guide and sustain each other and together provide a unique environment for research, critical inquiry, and scholarly exchange.

The Digital Art History team at the Getty Research Institute sponsors and advises collaborative art-historical research and publication projects that facilitate access to and analysis of digitized objects, particularly those in the Institute's collections. The team collaborates on these projects with colleagues from across the Getty and with experts in software development, user research, semantic engineering, and digital publications. Critical to these projects is the development of innovative working methods and technological tools that can be adopted by the broader art-historical and cultural heritage communities.

Access digitized art history publications, rare books, and related literature.

The Benezit Dictionary of Artists offers nearly 170,000 entries on artists from antiquity to the present day and featuring regular updates. Benezit contains thousands of auction records, museum holdings, and bibliographies. In addition to its outstanding scope and depth, two features in particular make Benezit unique among art reference works: its coverage of obscure artists and the inclusion of images of artists’ signatures, monograms, and stamps.

The guide is divided into two sections:
1) Selected Dealer Archives Locations
An abbreviation key necessary for locating many of the archives listed in the second section. Where possible, direct links to archives have been added to the guide.
2) Dealers, Galleries, and Scholars

Collection of digitally transcribed art sales records. Best for historic research. Includes:

Archival Inventories from private collections in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and France from 1550 to 1840;
Sales Catalogs, from major cities in Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia from 1650 to 1945 and German Sales Catalogs from 1930 to 1945;
Goupil & Cie Stock Books, 43,700 records transcribed from the 15 stock books of Goupil & Cie/Boussod, Valadon & Cie;
Payments to Artists, 1,000 recorded payments to artists made in Rome between 1576 and 1711;
Public Collections, descriptions and provenances of paintings created by artists born before 1900 held by public institutions in Great Britain and the United States 1500 to 1990.

auction price information going back to the late 20th century.

Over 3.5 million auction records for paintings, prints, photographs, sculpture, works on paper, and miniatures dating back to the 1920s. Over 200,000 artists from more than 500 auction houses worldwide are represented.