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This bibliography selects and describes reference materials which are frequently of use in the discipline of art history as it is taught in the Penn State Art History Department graduate programs. Hopefully, this list of reference books, databases, and websites will be consulted by graduate students as needed throughout their studies. The subjects in art history covered here attempt to correspond to the course offerings in Art History. For example, Latin American or Australian art are not emphasized in this long list. The principal reason for its length is that published bibliographies with similar scope have all become outdated. I have organized this bibliography by tool types. Each section begins with an explanation of the type because an understanding of these formats for reference resources can help when your projects take you into some other field of study. The names of these formats are not used consistently by publishers and librarians, nor are the names important. But understanding the type of tool, and how it can be used, is useful indeed.
People can give you both kinds of information at once: locations and quick facts. The faculty, other students, and librarians can be good sources. The most relevant group of librarians for your studies will probably be the Arts and Humanities librarians (UP) and perhaps the Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts or the University Archivist. If you are not sure who to contact in the Libraries, I would be happy to make recommendations.
The purpose of a guide to research (also called a bibliographic guide) is the same as this document – to help you determine which reference books, databases, and similar resources might be useful for your work. Web guides usually aim to help you determine which Internet sites might be most useful for your research. The printed guides to research in art history have generally been unable to keep pace with the new electronic resources – while most of the web-based guides tend to ignore useful printed resources. A few of the guides to research listed below (those marked with a * are useful for identifying one or two “classic” scholarly surveys of a fairly broad topic, such as Spanish ironwork, or Byzantine icons.
The Penn State librarians have compiled many fine guides to reference materials for different topics. You can browse the topics at: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/research.html.
Specialized encyclopedias are fine places to get a quick start on solving many kinds of problems. They synthesize a lot of other published information. Reading a brief summary of a topic, at the beginning of your exploration, can help you make better choices as your research progresses. The best encyclopedias refer you to the essential literature on each subject (usually with brief bibliographies at the end of each entry.) Many large encyclopedias have entries on general topics, and access to more specific subjects through an index at the back. The specialized encyclopedias below feature articles signed by recognized authorities and contain well-chosen lists for further reading. Although the words are often used interchangeably, I am making a distinction between “encyclopedia” and “dictionary”, reserving the latter for books that simply define terms without providing much discussion or recommended readings.
These describe conventional subjects depicted in art. They usually list examples of specific artworks representing the theme and often provide references to writings on that theme. Some also list primary textual sources related to the subject.
Many of the titles in the Dictionaries section can be used for basic information on an iconographic theme, motif, character, symbol, or attribute. They seldom provide lists of art works or bibliographies, but some include a brief reference to a source document or a useful illustration, etc..
Biographical dictionaries can be similar to encyclopedias, except that the only type of entries in biographical dictionaries will be the names of people. Like encyclopedias, the best ones refer you to some other sources of information. There are many possible biographical dictionaries for the artist, patron, or author that you might want to find. A handy way to figure out which one to use is to search Biography and Genealogy Master Index (one of the databases on the Libraries web pages). It doesn't tell you anything about the person, but it will tell you which biographical dictionary contains the information. As a matter of fact, it points to about 10 million brief biographies. A similar index to biographical dictionaries is designed specifically for artist's names (see below, the Bio-Bibliographischer Index of the Allgemeines Kunstlerlexicon (#81). So start with these. Also remember that Oxford Art Online (#34) is largely comprised of biographical entries and is not indexed in either of the above. With these three resources you can find brief biographies of most artists. But if they disappoint you, read on.
Finding biographical information on art historians or critics is more difficult. For basic data on the living, try:
And, for a completely different kind of art participant, seldom documented well:
A catalogue raisonne attempts to provide comprehensive documentation of all of the works by a particular artist, or some defined portion of the artist's work such as the prints or all works within a specific time span. The entry for a work usually includes title, date, media, dimensions, signature, location, provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography for the work. Often description, critical analysis, or discussion of attribution are also present. In the more recent publications, each entry is usually illustrated. In addition to including all certain attributions, some catalogues raisonne include descriptions of spurious or uncertain works. The term catalogue raisonne is often used synonymously with oeuvre catalogue. But technically, an oeuvre catalogue contains less extensive information on each work. To find these handy publications, try combining the keywords “raisonne” or “oeuvre” or “oeuvres” with the artist's name in Library Catalogues. However, this search won't work on some titles, so it is wise to also check:
Web search engines can also provide fast starts on a research problem. In fact, in a few short years World Wide Web search engines have become the most popular tools by far for finding information because they are convenient, can be used without much skill, and frequently produce useful results. Remember these important points about search engines:
Search engines cannot see the contents of most databases. They are only designed to find html and similar “pages.” They usually can't retrieve the contents of databases such as library catalogs or Art Abstracts or any of the nearly 400 databases that the University subscribes to. (There are a growing number of exceptions to this rule. See for example Google Scholar, below #91.)
Most web resources are self-published and vary widely in quality, so you have more work to do in evaluating them than you would with other publications. Trade and academic publishers put effort into assuring the quality of their books and magazines in order to assure that they are profitable. Only a very small percentage of web sites attempt those standards. When you use web sites you are taking on extra responsibility for judging quality. Generally, graduate students in art history are pretty good at this type of critical evaluation. Even so, checklists (such as the ones posted at http://www.vuw.ac.nz/staff/alastair_smith/evaln/evaln.htm) can be helpful reminders for you or for your students. Also keep in mind that it is very difficult for undergraduates to identify a disciplinary discourse community on the Internet.
Using search engines well requires skills that are very similar to the ones needed for searching databases. Because search engines scan millions of items, they almost always return some results even if poor search statements are entered. But search engines usually have powerful features that are not invoked unless you specify them. Use the most unique terms that relate to your topic and learn how to search phrases – “usually surrounded by quotes like this.” Learning to read and shorten URLs (web addresses) is an important skill. Another is choosing the right search engine for the right job. One easy way to learn these tricks quickly is to use the guide posted by a non-profit group called Infopeople. Their Search Tools Chart selects a small number of good search engines and web guides, explains what they are searching, and describes the search features of each. A more inclusive guide to search engines, and what jobs they are suited for, is Noodle Tools' Choose the Best. Try opening the Search Tools Chart or Noodle Tools in one window and experiment with different search engines and techniques in another. Never settle for just one search. Experimentation is very important in web searching. For example, type any 3 unrelated search terms (frog metal wheat?) as a search statement in Google then change the order of the three terms a few times and see how the results of the search change. Or try Googlewhacking! (It's a sport. Look it up.) Trial-and-error learning is especially important with search engines since search engine companies tend to be secretive about their workings and features change frequently.
Google is not the best choice for every task. Some new search engines have specialties which can make them much more effective than Google for a particular need. Here are some examples related to academic research:
Of course library catalogues contain records describing the books they own. Note that most library catalogues only have a single record for each magazine title; they do not include records for each of the articles in a magazine. (For that, see the section on Periodical Indexes below.) But in addition to books and magazines, library catalogues may contain records for archival materials, audio-visual materials, vertical file ephemera, electronic books, software, and even selected web sites.
Sometimes it can be handy to search a distant library catalogue. Library websites are easy to find using a web search engine. But don't depend too much on a single library's specialty or reputation. No library has everything about anything. Usually, you'll find a better selection in WorldCat (#94). However, it is less thorough for the holdings of European libraries. To browse European library websites, try the site maintained by librarians who specialize in European studies: Western European Library Catalogs on the Internet. For Asian library catalogues, see the Association for Asian Studies web site (#15) and for African ones, see the Africa South of the Sahara web site (#17).
Periodical indexes are designed to direct readers to articles and reviews in magazines and journals. Each of the ones listed in this section can be used to find articles on a particular topic or by a particular author. “Abstracts” are simply periodical indexes which include a few sentences summarizing the contents of each article indexed. In many of the electronic periodical indexes, you may see a “Get It“ button next to the description of a specific article. Click “Get It” and the software will determine if Penn State has access to an electronic version of the article, will look the magazine up in The CAT (#93), or will offer to place the information about the article in an Inter-Library Loan request for you. When the “Get It” button is not available, check the title of each magazine in The CAT to find out if it is held in our library and to get the classification number so that you can find it on the shelves. Although periodical indexes always emphasize journal articles, some of them also index dissertations, exhibition catalogues, collections of essays, dig reports, and other types of books. When they contain lots of these other types of publications the term “current bibliography” is often used rather than “periodical index”.
Citation indexes are a special type of periodical index. They index a magazine article three ways: by its author, by the keywords in its title, and also through each of the footnotes from the article. This data is made searchable by author and, to some extent, by title. If you have a publication which is important to your research, you could use a citation index to find more recent articles which have cited it. This can be a good way to find responses to the important publication. Also, specific mention of a work of art is treated like a footnote (whether or not a footnote is used). So this can also be a good tool for locating articles that mention a particular art object. Citation indexes are a little tricky to use. It's a good idea to ask for help the first time you try.
For modern topics popular magazines and newspapers can provide fascinating and fresh primary sources. (If used carefully. There were at least as many errors in the news then as there are now.) Browsing a few newspapers or magazines is practical if you have a specific date that is important for your research. But if your research does not focus well on a specific event, you need to consult an index to a newspaper or to popular magazines, or perhaps one of the new full-text databases of news or mags. Most of the full-text databases focus on recent publications, but those listed below have significant historical backfiles. Here are some indexes and full-text databases for American popular magazines:
An index to reproductions (also called an illustration index) is a device for finding a picture of a particular work of art in a book or exhibition catalogue. All of the following examples list color and black-and-white reproductions by the artist's name and the title of the piece. So, for example, you might use this type of tool to discover that a photograph of Lincoln visiting his troops, by Alexander Gardner, can be found as figure 142 of Gernsheim's History of Photography. Some also list works by subject matter and can be very handy for iconographical investigation. Here is a selection. More are available.
The primary source materials found in archives can often provide excitingly fresh material for your research. Even though we usually think of traveling to do research in archives, it is not always necessary to do so. If your needs are specific enough, many archives will mail photocopies of small amounts of materials. However, this requires some preliminary research into the specific documents you need. This type of preparation also helps even when you plan to travel to an archive, so you can get the most from your visit. Indexes to archival holdings can help figure out what exists and where to go for it. World Cat (#94) also contains many records for archival materials. It is important to remember that most archival collections are described in what might be called “chunks”. For example, if you want a specific letter from Andy Warhol to Richard Nixon (wouldn't that be nice) the collection with such a letter in it might be described as “Andy Warhol papers. Correspondence, 1959-1978.” Sometimes the names of some of the most frequent or important writers or receivers of letters are listed. The level of detail can vary widely.
Archival documents are often included in library digitization projects, so see Digital Library Collection, below.
Indexes to museum holdings attempt to list the works, usually of a certain type, held in several art museums. The paper versions are usually alphabetical lists of artists, then titles of works. The newer databases that are replacing these inventories often include a digital image of the work.
Europeana (see #149)
For nearly 20 years many libraries and archives have been digitizing portions of their collections and posting them on the web. Because of copyright considerations, these efforts have usually focused upon special collections -- rare and archival materials. Many digital library collections are heavily pictorial. Historic photos, popular illustration, posters, and other visual ephemera are often found in these collections. Unfortunately access to these resources is still disorganized -- scattered across the web sites of each library. Since this information is usually organized in databases, it is frequently invisible to web search engines. (Search engines can index the contents of web pages, but often not the records within a database.) The sources below attempt to provide access to multiple digital library collections.
Some references to doctoral dissertations can be found in library catalogues and many periodical indexes. However some resources focus specifically on dissertations and are more thorough. When selecting a thesis topic, doctoral students are frequently asked to verify that the topic has not been handled in an earlier dissertation and that it is not currently chosen by another student. These are the main sources to check in that case:
There are many ways to find large collections of pictures in books or on the Internet. Some tips are in a Picture and Image Sources Guide. Here, I simply want to emphasize two types of picture collections: large pictorial microfiche sets and a few of the many collections of digital pictures. The microfiche sets deserve some attention because they contain so many unusual images, often of works of art which have little or nothing written about them – fresh material. (The pictorial microfiche are currently housed in cabinets near the Arts and Humanities Library Reference Collection 2nd floor of Pattee.) The digital picture collections are a mixed bag - but often extremely convenient to use. Of course, there are many other ways to search for pictures on the web, including some excellent image search engines. But search engines do not penetrate into most of the pictorial databases listed below. Additional sources for digital images are listed in the art and art history web guides listed in the first section of this bibliography.
Base Jaconde. (See #141)
Europeana. (See #149)
More mages information can be found in this Research Guide: Image Databases at Penn State
Getting the meaning of a specialized term often requires a specialized dictionary. There are many which may be useful for art history. Here are a few examples:
A historical atlas can show you where places were, other geographical information about them, and how they relate to modern places.
These are lists of events in chronological order. Don't take the dates as exact ones. Use these for an easy way to note what else was happening at a particular time - in politics, literature, science, etc.
In writing a paper for publication, authors must adhere to a style manual which indicates how the many variables of writing should be handled to create a useful consistency in the publication. Some style manuals only dictate the details of how to format footnotes and bibliographies. There are many of these -- each profession's literature seems to have a preference. A few other manuals indicate many more subtle matters of grammar and usage. (Warning! Please do not use this bibliography as a guide for your footnotes or bibliographies. Style-wise, it is a mess.) For art history and related disciplines the following style manuals are commonly used:
If your writing is criticized, read:
