Art & Architecture Collection

Art History: A Research Guide

 

The New York Public Library has the largest publicly accessible collection in the Americas of materials related to the history of art. The majority of publications are located in the Art & Architecture Collection, but other works can be found throughout the Library’s collections depending on the language which they were published in and if their contents touch on other disciplines. Writings on art go back to antiquity, but over the centuries several significant milestones mark the point at which art historical writing began to develop in earnest. Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) published his Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors in 1550, with an updated edition in 1568, making it one of the first real works of art historiography. John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843) represents another important step in critical writing and evaluation of art and its makers. A number of Enlightenment era and 19th century German scholars, among others, helped establish art history as a historical discipline. By the turn of the 20th century, iconography and connoisseurship had become integral parts of art historical methodology. Art history prospered as a field of academic study after World War II, and theoretical methodologies blossomed from the 1970s onward, to include such diverse approaches as Marxist, feminist, and post-structuralist thought, among others. Most of all, however, art history remains an interdisciplinary study incorporating visual culture and social history perspectives.

The reference works in this guide, along with selected reference tools for photography research, can all be found in the Art & Architecture Collection Reading Room (Room 300). Other collections that possess art historical materials include Photography, Prints, Spencer Collection, The General Research Division, Rare Books, Manuscripts and Archives, Asian and Middle Eastern Division, Slavic and Baltic Division, and the Jewish Division.

Compiled by Paula A. Baxter, Art & Architecture Collection, 11/07