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ART 210/212: Art History

A brief overview on researching textual and visual resources within the discipline of Art History.

Locating Images

Locating images for artwork is easy, however, locating high quality, official images requires a little more effort. You can use Google Images to browse and investigate works of art, but you must then find the official and licensed source of the image.

   Artist Website

   Museum Website

   Organization Website

   TinEye: can be used sometimes to help track down the original online instance of an image (not necessarily the image's owner)

Citing Images and Artwork:

All citation formats have very specific criteria that must be followed. In this class your image citations must follow the following rules. An example, Cloud Gate,  is displayed on the 'home' page of this libguide. Each required term is listed below the other so that no two criteria are on the same line:

  • Figure number:  Each image in your paper should be numbered chronologically as they appear. Figure 1, Figure 2, Figure 3, etc.

  • Creator: The entity responsible for creating the art work. This could include the name of the artist, author, brandname, fabricator, etc. If the entity resonsible for the creation of the work can not be determined, write 'unknown', in this space.

  • Title: This is the official name of the work given by the creator of the work. If it is unknown give a descriptive name of the work. The title MUST be italicized.

  • Original location: (OPTIONAL for this assignment--it may not apply to your work if you simply purchased it directly). To know if you need to include this, consider if this item came from another collection (hand-me-down, if you will) or if the item has been moved to a museum or another site. This may not be critical to your object for this assignment, but it’s crucial to the understanding of works of art and art history, generally.

  • Date of creation: (this is not addressed by Stokstad, as her book is in chronological order) If you’re unsure, you may put Undated (or n.d.) and then estimate when you think the work was made.

  • Medium: The materials the art work is made/composed of.

  • Dimensions: Height then width then length, in feet (') and inches(''), with meters and centimeters in parentheses if you wish.

  • Present location: Where is the work of art located? In a museum, an exhibit, a collection, or in situ?

  • Image source: (Not addressed by Stokstad) Your choices are: “Courtesy of the author” or the actual weblink or photocopy source. In other words, where did you locate the image – did you photocopy it from a book? Indicate author of book and page number (and be sure to include this book in your bibliography). If you located the image online, then you will need to provide the exact link to the specific website.  Putting the words “google image” is not specific enough.