Provides text descriptions and bibliographic references for works of art produced worldwide from early apostolic times up to A.D. 1550, with a particular emphasis and focus on art of the western world.
Note: The database is both text and image although some works of art may not have an accompanying image. Approximately thirty percent of the images, due to copyright laws, are restricted for public use and cannot be accessed by the public subscriber.

The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History pairs essays and works of art with chronologies, telling the story of art and global culture through the Museum’s collection.

Brings together the Bodleian Libraries' (Oxford University) discrete digital collections under a single user interface. Includes, but is not restricted to: manuscripts, incunabula, maps, periodicals, printed and manuscript music collections.

This website, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, makes available a searchable database of prints and book illustrations from early modern Britain (@1540-1700).

A project of the Folger Shakespeare Library to digitize and index 10,000 (currently 6,700) woodcut and engraved illustrations in British and English-language books, for the years 1604 – 1640.

Rich collection of primary materials. Access online collections: view maps & photographs; read letters, diaries & newspapers; hear personal accounts of events; listen to sound recordings & watch historic films.

Search 400,000+ objects held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Search 2 million+ collection objects held by the British Museum.

Provides free access to 900,000+ images (some in public domain) digitized from the The NYPL's collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs, streaming video, and more. Search by keyword or Browse Collections. Encompasses the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, including: printed volumes; pamphlets; broadsides; literary archives and manuscripts, representing the work of 400+ authors. Printed books in English date from William Caxton to the present day.

Over 100,000 freely available digitized images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute to search and download.

Search across the Yale Center for British Art’s online catalogue, currently representing 100,000+ records from the Center’s collections.

The Harvard Library's dedicated image catalog. It includes content from archives, museums, libraries, and other collections throughout Harvard University.

Search millions of records of museum objects, archives and library materials including online images, audio & videos and blog posts.

An educational resource designed for teachers and students featuring primary sources from the Newberry Library's (Chicago) holdings, contextual essays, and discussion questions. See also Digital Newberry.

This collection holds and provides access to books, serials, and microforms containing information by and about people of African descent throughout the world, concentrating on the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. Geographically, the collection emphasizes the Americas, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. NOTE: For the period Medieval-18th c, this collection has relevance for its collection of maps.

An online platform through which the public can access high-resolution images of artworks housed in the initiative’s partner museums worldwide.

This internationally recognized image database provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains @100,000 images, is global in coverage, and includes all areas of visual imagery.

An all-digital library that aggregates information and thumbnails for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums in the United States.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries, covering the time period 8000 BCE-2000 CE.

Explore the digital resources of Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. Holdings date back to @the 12th century. Co-funded by the European Union.

Virtual museum and searchable database of European fine arts (e.g., painting, sculpture, etc.) from the 8th to mid-19th centuries.

Search for images and other Internet content from other established web sites (such as Google Images or YouTube) that the content producers stated could be used commercially and/or with modification. For example, when you use Creative Commons to search Google Images, it will return only those images that are labeled for commercial reuse with modification. (read more about Creative Commons).

[University of Rochester] This Robbins Library Digital Project documents, through a bibliography and numerous images, the history of illustrations of Chaucer’s works through postmedieval illustrated versions of his works.

The archive began as a digital humanities project sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is now overseen by an advisory board from the US and UK. The archive provides digital reproductions of the various works of William Blake, alongside annotation, commentary and scholarly materials related to Blake.

[University of Rochester] This Robbins Library Digital Project is designed to make available a database of Arthurian texts, images, bibliographies, and basic information.

[University of Rochester] This Robbins Library Digital Project is designed to make available a database of texts, images, bibliographies, and basic information about the Robin Hood stories and other outlaw tales.

[University of Rochester] This Robbins Library Digital Project provides a bibliography with annotations of narratives that take their influence and inspiration from the historical crusades, with a current focus on English and American literature.

This website contains a searchable collection of more than 3,000 illustrations from four complete sets of the works of Shakespeare, all published in the mid-19th c. Created by Michael Goodman as an outcome of his PhD thesis at Cardiff University. For each illustration, brief information is given regarding illustrator name, engraver, original size, source of the text, and publishing information.