Art & Art History

Museum catalogs focus on a period or genre of art found within a particular museum. 

Within these catalogs, you'll find scholarly opinions, conservation reports, provenance, and a bibliography.

If you know which museum a particular work of art is found within, try searching for a museum catalog.  Search for these catalogs within WorldCat.

Your search would be something like this:  Metropolitan Museum of Art Catalogs (click on KEYWORD, choose SUBJECT).

Image source: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Erithrean Sibyl, 1508-1512. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

Catalogues Raisonnés list and describe all of the works by a particular artist.   Sometimes they will focus on groups of artists, a particular medium used by the artist, or on a particular time period. 

For each work listed in the Catalogues Raisonnés,  the following is provided:

• title
• images
• medium
• dimensions
• description of various states, or editions
• discussion of related work, commentary by the curator
• provenance
• bibliography of articles discussing the work

Ofttimes, but not always, the Catalogues Raisonnés will also contain:

• biographical information 
• questionable works
• examples of the artist's signature

Search for Catalogues Raisonnés within WorldCat.

Corpora (corpus, singular) are Catalogues Raisonnés for a particular type of object.  

There are, for example, corpora for:

• Greek pottery (Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum);
• Florentine altarpieces (Offner);
• Stain glass windows (Corpus Vitrirarum).

Corpora are collections of  images and scholarly opinion, are frequently ongoing, and oftimes consist of several volumes published over several years.

An example: 

Caviness, Madeline Harrison.  Stained Glass Before 1700 in American Collections:  Corpus Vitrirarum Checklist.  Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1985-1991.

Search for corpora in WorldCat.