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Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, Endymion Asleep, c. 1505-10. Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. ; artres.com, (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Nicolas Guy Brenet, Sleeping Endymion, 1756. © Worcester Art Museum, all rights reserved.

Luca Giordano, Diana and Endymion, 1675. National Gallery of Art

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Diana and Endymion, 1753. National Gallery of Art

If you’re still trying to adjust to the start of Daylight Saving Time, we’d like to give you a little bit of advice: don’t let the mythological gods of Greece and Rome catch you napping. Seeing mortals sleeping seems to bring out the worst in them.

Here are three of the most notorious examples:

Endymion and Selene

Depending on whom you ask, Zeus either offered the beautiful shepherd Endymion a wish and Endymion chose to sleep and remain youthful forever, or the eternal sleep wasn’t a gift at all, but rather a punishment because Endymion had attempted to seduce Zeus’ wife, Hera.

Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768. The National Gallery, London

By Katy Matsuzaki, Manager of Academic Programs, New Britain Museum of American Art

Recently a group of docents at the New Britain Museum of American Art gathered in a gallery filled with landscapes and portrait paintings to discuss how they might approach the art with a middle school math class scheduled for a visit. As they looked closely at works by Georgia O’Keefe and Robert Henri, and listened to the more math-minded among them explore geometry, proportion, and compositional formulas therein, fear of the “math tour” quickly gave way to excitement over a new, mathematical way to approach and appreciate artworks.

As the staff member who greenlighted the math field trip, I was heartened by the docents’ willingness to embrace the unknown. Math students in an art museum might at first seem like a foreign concept, but in reality, the immersive visual environment that a curated collection of art images provides can be an incredibly beneficial learning tool for not only the study of mathematics, but the other STEM fields (science, technology, math, and engineering) as well.

Editor’s note: this post was originally published in February 2013 and has been updated to reflect platform changes.

Joy Spanabel Emery, Decadent Rich 3 sketch, 1970. University of Rhode Island: Theatre Department Images

Joy Spanabel Emery, Martine with Lucas and Valere, 1984. University of Rhode Island: Theatre Department Images

Did you know that Artstor contains publicly available collections that cover everything from flowers and turtles to medicine labels and political memorabilia–and are are also a great resource for theatre studies? Below, we discuss five collections which offer a fascinating view of the history and art of theatre, including books, costume and set design, and even photographs of productions.

The ‘Codex Mendoza’, pt. I.; fol. 002r, early 1540s. Image and original data provided by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Copyright Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

As we built our AP® Art History Teaching Resources over the last three years, we found ourselves fascinated by some of the newly required content. The art of the Colonial Americas is represented in the curriculum framework by six distinct objects. One of these is the “Codex Mendoza,” named for the first viceroy of Mexico (1535-1550), who commissioned it c. 1542 (contributed to the Artstor Digital Library by the Bodleian Library). Intended as a gift to Charles V, the manuscript never reached the monarch.

Alliance will enhance access to multimedia digital resources to support education and research

James Shulman, President of Artstor, and Kevin Guthrie, President of ITHAKA, today announced a new strategic alliance between the two not-for-profit organizations that will benefit thousands of colleges, universities, schools, museums, and other educational institutions. Artstor, the provider of the Artstor Digital Library of images and the Shared Shelf platform for cataloguing and digital asset management, will now function under the umbrella of ITHAKA, which currently operates the services JSTOR, Portico and Ithaka S+R.

Diego M. Rivera, Self Portrait, 1921. Image and original data provided by Detroit Institute of Arts, © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Diego M. Rivera, Self Portrait, 1941. Image and original data provided by Detroit Institute of Arts, © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Frida Kahlo is world-famous for her self-portraits, which were a big part of her relatively small oeuvre (55 out of 144 paintings), while her husband Diego Rivera, despite producing much more work than Kahlo, only painted himself approximately 20 times. Why is that?

Attributed to John James Audubon, Pomarine Jager; Lestris Pomarinus, 1827-38. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

No doubt you are familiar with the work of the renowned wildlife artist John James Audubon, most likely his famous prints from The Birds of America. But did you know he wasn’t the only artist in the family? His son, John Woodhouse Audubon, spent much of his career supporting the work of his father, but he made a valuable contribution to wildlife documentation himself. (You can compare the two Audubons’ styles in the images below: the father’s are on the left, the son’s on the right.)

John James Audubon, Lepus gacialis; Leach; Polar Hare, 1844. Amon Carter Museum of American Art

John Woodhouse Audubon, Lepus texianus; Aud. & Bach; Texian Hare, 1848. Amon Carter Museum of American Art

John James Audubon, American Beaver, 1854. Amon Carter Museum of American Art

John Woodhouse Audubon, Arctomys pruinosus; Pennant; Hoary Marmot, 1846. Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Sandro Botticelli, Primavera; Allegory of Spring, c. 1478, Galleria degli Uffizi. Image and original data provided by ©SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com; scalarchives.com

Kenyon Cox (1856-1919) might now be best remembered for his murals in the Library of Congress, as well as in the state capitol buildings of Des Moines, St. Paul, and Madison, but he was also a respected writer and influential teacher. In 1911, he delivered a series of lectures on painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, later published as The Classic Point of View. His accessible writing style and his infectious enthusiasm for the Old Masters still speak to us today. Following is an excerpt from his lecture on the importance of drawing, focusing on the work of Botticelli and Michelangelo.

Drawing is a great expressional art and deals with beauty and significance, not with mere fact. Its great masters are the greatest artists that ever lived, and high attainment in it has always been rarer than high attainment in color. Its tools are the line and so much of light and shade as is necessary to convey the sense of bulk and modelling, anything more being something added for its own beauty and expressiveness, not a part of the sources of the draftsman. Its aims are, first, to develop in the highest degree the abstract beauty and significance possessed by lines in themselves, more or less independently of representation; second, to express with the utmost clearness and force the material significance of objects and, especially, of the human body. According as one or the other of these aims predominates we have one or the other of the two great schools into which draftsmen may be divided. These schools may be typified by the greatest masters of each, the school of Botticelli, or the school of pure line; the school of Michelangelo, or the school of significant form. Between these lie all the law and the prophets. Of course no artist ever belonged entirely and exclusively to either school. It is always a matter of balance and the predominance of interest. Even a Botticelli tried to put some significant form inside his beautiful lines, and even Michelangelo gave thought to the abstract beauty of his lines apart from the significant form they bounded.

The students of the Jacksonville Female Academy seated in front of Academy Hall, ca. 1890. The team at Illinois College plans to incorporate this photo into the Jacksonville Female Academy collection on Artstor.

Jenny Barker Devine, Associate Professor of History at Illinois College and the author of On Behalf of the Family Farm, shares her thoughts on how the Consortium on Digital Resources for Teaching and Research will impact her upcoming book. This essay first appeared on her blog American Athena.

With American Athena, I want to write a new kind of book – one that exists in a dynamic and living space, responsive to readers and as instructive in design as it is in content. This new kind of book acknowledges the reader as an active participant in producing new knowledge. A kind of crowdsourcing.

In addition to the blog and the book manuscript, I am creating online collections that will allow you, the reader, to interact with the same documents, photographs, and artifacts that I see (and hopefully offer your own interpretations of them). With any luck and lots of hard work, the first images will be available in spring 2016.

This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but Illinois College’s digital infrastructure just didn’t support my end goal. Then, Danielle Trierweiler, IC’s Digital Services Librarian, approached me last spring with the idea to apply for the Council of Independent Colleges’ Consortium on Digital Resources for Teaching and Research, which, in cooperation with Artstor, provides Consortium members with access to Shared Shelf [now JSTOR Forum], “a cloud-based asset management service.” This allows us to make key records of the Khalaf Al Habtoor Archives available to a global audience and forces me, at an early stage, to curate important documents central to my research. As an author, I find this incredibly exciting.

Earlier this summer we announced that with $2.2 million in support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Artstor and the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) will support the digital documentation of collections held by 42 liberal arts colleges and universities. The Consortium on Digital Resources for Teaching and Research, as the project is known, subsidizes the use of Shared Shelf, Artstor’s digital asset management service, to catalog the institutions’ collections and make them publicly accessible via the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

Though the project has barely started, the schools’ local newspapers are already expressing enthusiasm: