Author Archives: Derek Churchill

About Derek Churchill

Derek Churchill is the Director of the Visual Resources Collection at the University of Delaware.

Exploring Rembrandt

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Rembrandt, Raising of Lazarus, circa 1630-1632, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Rembrandt, Raising of Lazarus, ca. 1630-1632, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Photograph provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, www.lacma.org)

You may have heard that Artstor recently allied itself with ITHAKA, the parent company of JSTOR. (And in case you missed it, Artstor had a pretty funny April Fools’ Day story about it.) Now that two of the leading providers of visual and textual content have joined forces, we should expect to see further integration of their resources.

A new pilot project gives us a glimpse of where this partnership may be heading in the future. Exploring Rembrandt shows how images of the master’s work from Artstor can be linked to articles in JSTOR that discuss them. It is still a small prototype–addressing only five of Rembrandt’s paintings so far–but I think it is easy to imagine how useful this could be on a much larger scale.

New and Expanded Collections Available in Artstor

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Édouard Manet, Le Repos, ca. 1870-1871, RISD Museum, Providence

Édouard Manet, Le Repos, ca. 1870-1871, RISD Museum, Providence

New and expanded collections in the Artstor Digital Library this spring include the following:

Embedded Metadata in Artstor

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An update to the Artstor Digital Library was released earlier this week, so you may have noticed a few differences in the way its interface now looks and acts.

Perhaps most significantly, you’ll see that downloading an image from Artstor now gives you just one file, not two. In the past, downloads produced two similarly named files on your computer: an image file (ending with the extension “.jpg”) and an associated metadata file (ending with “.html”). And ever since Artstor dropped Java three years ago, these two files have come to you as a single zip file, which required you to go through the additional (and annoying) step of “unzipping” the file first.

Artstor’s solution to the problem of having to juggle two different files for each download–plus dealing with those wildly unpopular zip files–has been to give you a single image file that also contains the metadata. This is called embedded metadata, because the information telling you about the artwork is coded directly into the JPEG file. This is especially useful if you download a lot of images from Artstor, because the embedded metadata will be searchable on your computer. So if you had downloaded the image illustrated here, you could search your hard drive for “Sforza” or “Piero” or “Uffizi” or any of the other words listed in the More Info box, and this image would appear in your results.

If you’re new to embedded metadata, all you really need to know is how to view it. It’s not terribly easy to access on a PC unless you have an imaging program like Photoshop installed on your computer. On a Mac, highlight the image file and then either choose Get Info from the File menu or type Command-I (⌘I), and a window like the one illustrated here will open.

But if you like having a separate text file containing the metadata, you can still get one in Artstor. Just click on Download Information in an image’s metadata panel. You can find more information on how to do this and much more on Artstor’s Embedded Metadata support page. (If you’re a PC user and you don’t already have Photoshop, you can even find a link there to a site where you can download a free–and legal!–copy of Photoshop CS2.)

And as always, if you need any help with embedded metadata, just contact me or another member of the VRC staff any time!

Rauschenberg Foundation Promotes Fair Use of Images

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Robert Rauschenberg, Odalisk, 1955-1958, Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Robert Rauschenberg, Odalisk, 1955-1958, Museum Ludwig, Cologne

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has taken the unprecedented and very promising step of relaxing its copyright restrictions and endorsing the fair use of its images. This means that for most educational or academic purposes, like teaching or publishing, reproduction of the Foundation’s images of artworks by Robert Rauschenberg is free, legal, and actually encouraged.

One of the most important postwar American artists, Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) emerged in the 1950s to challenge the prevailing current of Abstract Expressionism in the US. His works revived some of the ideas Dada had introduced earlier in the 20th century, and set the stage for the Pop art of the 1960s. It seems fitting that an artist like Rauschenberg–who unabashedly appropriated and incorporated “found objects” made by someone else into his own work–should lead the way towards the free and legal use of copyrighted images.

 

2015 Artstor Summary

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Freake-Gibbs Painter, Elizabeth Clarke Freake (Mrs. John Freake) and Baby Mary (detail), ca. 1671, Worcester Art Museum

Freake-Gibbs Painter, Elizabeth Clarke Freake (Mrs. John Freake) and Baby Mary (detail), ca. 1671, Worcester Art Museum

As we enter the new year, the Artstor Digital Library now has more than two million images. To see all the collections that were added or expanded in 2015, and for a preview of what’s coming up in 2016, check out Artstor’s year-end summary.

Two new collections of note were added over the holidays:

And just today, several more Artstor collections have been enlarged:

New Collections and New Images Available in Artstor

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Kwakwaka'wakw artist, Headdress Frontlet, pre-contact, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

Kwakwaka’wakw artist, Headdress Frontlet, pre-contact, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

Just in time for the holidays, Artstor has released a number of new and expanded collections in the Artstor Digital Library:

Sinai Icon Collection at Princeton

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Byzantine, Saint Peter the Apostle (detail), 6th century, Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai (photo © The Sinai Icon Collection, Princeton University)

Byzantine, Saint Peter the Apostle (detail), 6th century, Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai (photo © The Sinai Icon Collection, Princeton University)

The Visual Resources Collection in Princeton University’s Department of Art & Archaeology has just launched an online Sinai Icon Collection. Built around the original color photography in the Princeton-Michigan Sinai Archive, these images document the unparalleled collection of Byzantine icons in Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai. They were photographed during the joint expeditions to the monastery carried out by Princeton, the University of Michigan, and the University of Alexandria between 1956 and 1965, led by renowned Byzantinists Kurt Weitzmann and George H. Forsyth. This new digital resource contains over a thousand images that users can download for use in class presentations. If you are unfamiliar with the icons at Mount Sinai, you may want to begin by browsing the online exhibition of Highlights of the Collection.

Open Access Week 2015

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This week is Open Access Week, an annual opportunity to highlight the benefits of sharing scholarly research and resources online.

Kevin Smith, director of the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communications at Duke University Libraries, will speak in the Morris Library Reading Room at 4:00 pm on Wednesday, October 21. His lecture, “The Meaning of Publication in the Digital Age, or What Open Access Can Do for You,” is part of UD’s celebration of Open Access Week.

You can read more about it in UDaily.

New Collections and New Images Available in Artstor

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Shaykh Zada, Divan of Hafiz (folio 77r), ca. 1530, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Shaykh Zada, Divan of Hafiz (folio 77r), ca. 1530, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

Just this week, the Artstor Digital Library has released over 20,000 new images. New collections include the following:

The following collections in the Artstor Digital Library have also been expanded with additional images:

The Papal Visit

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Caradosso, Pope Julius II [obverse] and View of Saint Peter's [reverse], 1506 (photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

Caradosso, Pope Julius II [obverse] and View of Saint Peter’s [reverse], 1506 (photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

Let’s face it: if you live around here, you’re probably not going to be doing a lot of driving this weekend. With all the pandemonium surrounding Pope Francis’s visit to Philadelphia, many of us are either hunkering down at home or getting out of town altogether.

What better time to think about all your favorite popes in art? Of course the first pope, Saint Peter, is a key figure. During the Middle Ages, there were a bunch of popes named Gregory and Innocent and whatnot. There was a Saint Francis (who was said to have miraculously appeared to Pope Nicholas V), but until 2013 there had never been a Pope Francis. For awhile, the Papal Court even moved from Rome to southern France, and sometimes there were simply too many popes at once. At the height of the Renaissance, Julius II commissioned Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, Raphael’s Stanze frescoes, and Bramante’s design for rebuilding Saint Peter’s Basilica. He also collected ancient sculptures like the Apollo Belvedere and Laocoön, which would inspire generations of artists. But not everybody was a fan of such papal indulgence, or indulgences for that matter. Martin Luther and other reformers soon challenged the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. When the Medici Pope Clement VII refused to annul the first marriage of Henry VIII, the king essentially declared himself the pope of England. The Vatican countered with a series of strong popes in the later 16th and 17th centuries. Innocent X was the patron of the Baroque sculptor Algardi, while Alexander VII preferred Bernini. But the temporal power of the popes began to wane in the 18th century, and by the death of the Pius IX in 1878, the Vatican complex was all that remained under their control.

All of these images–and many thousands more–are now free and available for anyone to use (legally!) because they were provided by institutions that have adopted generous Open Access policies. So thank you to such museums as the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Walters Art Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. I encourage everyone to reward them with a little extra Web traffic this papal weekend!