Visual Art on the Internet

Here are some on-line resources for art, sculpture and architecture. This is an expandable list: please send interesting links or requests for things you don't see to me, clowney@rowan.edu, and help this resource grow!

At Rowan: The Westby Gallery shows your work, faculty work, and the work of various invited guests.

A great place to start: A huge collection of websites, managed by the International Council of Museums, may be found at http://www.icom.org. This is a kind of museum of museums; it lists its members and many other major museums and libraries that have websites; great for humanities and sciences as well as the arts. Most of what is listed on this page may also be found on ICOM's.

The Web Gallery of Art has a large collection of high quality images, and is easily searchable.

Another great general site is the Web Museum in Paris.

Mark Harden's Artchive has a wide selection of artists, with several images for each. The scans are good, the images large, and in general it's an excellent resource. Takes some time to load.

The Artcyclopedia is another on-line resource, with a very large number of artists represented. It's a search engine focused on fine art.

The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, has a fine collection, and a great virtual tour. The "zoom" function is especially helpful, as it lets you see some real detail. The tour pans around the rooms of the museum, so you see everything that's there in its actual setting. Some things take a while to load; but it's usually worth it.

The National Gallery in Washington, DC has excellent virtual tours, including good detail shots of the works on any tour. The museum makes much of its collection available on line.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York also makes some fine representative pieces available on line and on virtual tours.

Here is a quick tour of The Art Institute of Chicago, another great source to explore.

Some good sites for Art History include:

A site for the cave at Chauvet, France, to get a glimpse of some really old art! The site for Lascaux is even better, with a wonderful tour, and a delighful design that makes you feel, when you enter, as if you have just come into the cave with a flashlight.

Art Images for Classroom Teaching, which provides downloadable images correlated to most of the standard art history texts.

The History of Art Virtual Library has a large collection of images. At present it is not well organized, many of the images are of poor quality, and there does not appear to be a zoom capability, nor are details of the images available. All the same, it's a useful place to look.

Art Source is another collection of sites and image banks, including many useful ones.

For ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture:

Oddyseus, the WWW server of the Greek ministry of culture, has lots of images and helpful information.

Tour the Acropolis at www.mechan.ntua.gr

Check out the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Ancient Greek Art page; it's beautifully done and full of great images!

There are a number of public domain images of Archaic, Hellenic, and Hellenistic Greek art. Go to the Ancient Greek wing of our virtual museum to see some of them, and find links to others.

For Medieval, Byzantine and Renaissance Western Art:

The Louvre

For Western Art from the 18th and 19th Centuries:

For Modern Western Art:

MOMA (The Museum of Modern Art)

The Guggenheim Museum

The Whitney

Some contemporary online galleries, and other resources:

Dia exhibits Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, and a number of contemporary artists, incuding current exhibits of electronic art.

Artrift is a blog (weblog) about art, especially contemporary art.

Inliquid.com is an online cooperative gallery for the Philadelphia area. See their resource section for a list of area galleries, and many links to their web-sites.

Some sites for African Art:

from the University of Pennsylvania

Some sites for African-American Art:

Damali Ayo (performance artist)

Some sites for Asian art:

Tour a 9th century Buddhist temple at Borodur

The Louvre