Blog Category: Case study

Ordered by Shapur I | Dam and Bridge at Shushtar; c. 260 | Image and original data provided by Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom

Peyvand Firouzeh, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge

Aridity in the Islamic world stands in contrast to the well-known landscape architecture of Islamic gardens, where water is used generously and luxuriously. The contrast hints at creative methods of dealing with water scarcity: from man-made canals and reservoirs to cisterns and qanats (subterranean tunnel-wells), examples of which can be seen in my image group, “Water Management in the Islamic World.” These solutions not only responded to the scarcity of water, but also made efficient use of the water that was unusable or inaccessible for agricultural purposes.

Unknown; Chinese | Taoist Priest’s Robe, c. 1850-1900 | Philadelphia Museum of Art | Image and data from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Amelia Nelson
Cataloging and Digital Services Librarian
Kansas City Art Institute

In the spring semester the library collaborated with the Fibers Department by hosting 500 growing silkworms in one of the display cases at the library entrance. The worms were grown as part of the course “Fiber History and Properties.” The silkworms’ development was tracked by students visiting the library and through a live feed broadcast on the library’s ustream channel. Playing host to these silkworms was a fun opportunity for the library to connect with students and to highlight some of the plethora of library resources available to fibers students. Some of these representative resources were compiled into a LibGuide. The guide incorporated the live feed of the growing silkworms and linked to fibers resources across the collection including an image group compiled from the Artstor Digital Library.

The Artstor image group complemented our physical collection and also provided unique imagery documenting the history of the silkworm industry and examples of silk used across cultures and throughout history. These images range from an 8th-century Caftan from the Caucasus Mountains to Grace Kelly’s silk tulle wedding gown. Each image provides unique high-quality image resolution especially usefully for fiber students. In the Caftan image, for example, students are able to zoom into the image to see repairs, the texture of the plain weave linen, and the faded silk decorative border. For a tactile fiber student, these detailed views provide insight into the construction, texture and materials—details that couldn’t be extrapolated from other images.

Unknown; Chinese | Taoist Priest's Robe, c. 1850-1900 | Philadelphia Museum of Art | Image and data from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Russian; Unknown | Dress, first half 19th century |Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image and original data from the Brooklyn Museum.

Emperor Huizong | Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, early 12th Century | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | Image and data from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Asian; artist unknown | Silkworm, 206 B.C. - A.D. 220 |The Minneapolis Institute of Arts | Image and data from The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

British | Mantua or court dress, 1740 - 1745 | Victoria and Albert Museum | Image and data from the Victoria and Albert Museum

This sample image group can be arranged chronologically, allowing users to compare the weaves of different silk textiles and to track the evolution of this fabric through time. Viewed together, this image group illustrates the important cultural, symbolic, and artistic role this luxurious fabric has held throughout its history, included in everything from tapestries to a 16th-century Emperor’s court robe to silk slippers from the 18th century. The images in this group perfectly dovetailed into the goal of the fibers LibGuide to build a bridge from the excitement and curiosity about the silkworms on display to the library’s rich collection of fiber resources.

Judy Chicago | The Dinner Party, 1974-1979 | © Judy Chicago Photo © Donald Woodman | © 2008 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Katherine Murrell
Instructor of Art History
Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design

In my class on women artists from the medieval period onward, one of the first activities students were asked to do was to work in small groups and write a list of ten female painters or sculptors active before 1950, but without looking for information online. Many minutes elapsed, and the group with the longest list only had eight names. It was a sobering realization that despite the hundreds of female practitioners of art, relatively few are commonly known. This oversight is apparent on many websites hosting libraries of images, but Artstor is a notable and praiseworthy exception.

The tools available on Artstor make researching and organizing presentations a streamlined delight, but the breadth and depth of its visual resources make it an outstanding library. The nearly 400 images from artist Judy Chicago are an exceptional example of this. Chicago’s landmark work, The Dinner Party, is widely represented in art history survey textbooks, and was a touchstone for our class. The studio photographs and other documentary images associated with the piece, and detailed images of various place settings, help vividly illustrate the scope of this collaborative and historic work.

Context of a smaller, older work was explored through the 12th-century image of Hildegard von Bingen, experiencing a vision like a fiery flame. This is another picture often shown in survey textbooks, but the Artstor collection includes the facsimile page from her Liber Scivias, showing the illustration as accompanying its text, in addition to many other richly illustrated folios.

Artists of significant accomplishment such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi, and many others, are represented with plentiful images. The extensive material offers valuable opportunities for examining recurring subjects of interest, such as the Jewish heroine Judith. Artists’ self-portraits are another significant  topic for discussion. Angelica Kauffman, a founding member of London’s Royal Academy of Art, created an eloquent self-portrait where she chooses between her loves of art and music, an image that still makes a powerful statement today about professional commitment.

Judy Chicago. The Dinner Party, 1974-1979. © Judy Chicago Photo © Donald Woodman. © 2008 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Mary Stevenson Cassatt | Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge, 1879 | Philadelphia Museum of Art| Image and data from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Judith Leyster | Merry Company, 1630 | Musée du Louvre | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com

Designed by: Kitagawa Utamaro | Midnight: Mother and Sleepy Child, 1790 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Artemisia Gentileschi | Judith and Her Maidservant, c. 1612 | Galleria Palatina | Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. | artres.com , scalarchives.com | (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence / ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Resources concerning the life and career of Rosa Bonheur include numerous paintings, studies, sketches, and photographs. Of particular note in the Artstor collection is a permit for which she regularly applied to French authorities to wear men’s clothing in public, in order to gain easier access to male-dominated settings not readily open to women.

The quantity of images for many artists is impressive, but also the details and installation views of works.  The story quilts of Faith Ringgold come alive with close-ups of image and text, and the monumental scale of Louise Bourgeois’ spiders are all the more impressive for the exhibition images.

While putting together my course, Artstor has been an invaluable partner, providing numerous images and source documents, and helping my students gain an expansive sense of the contributions of women artists in the present and past centuries. The field of art history, and the experience in the classroom, is undeniable richer for this resource.

Jan Vermeer | The Astronomer, 1668 | The Astronomer | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y | artres.com artres.com

Dr. Martha Hollander
Professor
Hofstra University

My research and teaching in art history has always focused on the ways in which a single work of art can open up an entire world of knowledge, making vivid and real the otherwise rather bland term “historical context.” For the past few years I have been working on a study of men’s fashions in the seventeenth century and their representations in Dutch art. This has involved making a number of image groups in Artstor where I connect visual art, textiles, and clothing accessories.

One project that has proved particularly rich culminated in a recently published article called “Vermeer’s Robe: Costume, Commerce and Fantasy in the Early Modern Netherlands.” It concerns the japonsche rok, the Japanese silk robe portrayed most famously in Vermeer’s The Astronomer and The Geographer.

These rare spoils of Asian trade were first presented annually by Japanese shoguns to officials of the Dutch east India Company (VOC) and thereafter were made available as Western copies. By the end of the seventeenth century, similar robes made of chintz or batik, also known as banyans, were imported from India and went through the same transformation to domestic product. All of these long, loose garments possessed a novelty and cachet unmatched by more abundant imports such as spices, lacquer, porcelain, and precious metals. They appear in portraits of eminent and wealthy men, as well as in fictionalized genre images of scholars and scientists. Collectively, these garments created an idealized costume of social and intellectual prestige. Behind it are the interactions among the forces of class, fashion, fantasy, exoticism, and, above all, the extraordinary taste-making power of the VOC.

Jan Vermeer | The Astronomer, 1668 | The Astronomer | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y | artres.com artres.com

Ludolf Backhuysen I Ships of the Dutch East India Company (Escadre Neerlandaise de la Compagnie des Indes), 1675 | Musée du Louvre | Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.

Islamic | Robe; court, 17th century | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Katsushika Hokusai | Woman Spinning Silk, 18th century |The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Japan | Formal Robe for Daimyo's Wife with Design of Wisteria and Peonies, 18th century | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

At the same time, Irt am currently teaching two courses – a survey course in baroque and rococo art, and another on east-west relations as expressed in art and artifacts. Artstor image groups create an ideal means of incorporating my research into both classrooms.

Students can, for example, start with a portrait or genre scene, focus on a particular piece of clothing or accessory, then create a study group. Conversely, they can choose types of artifact, e.g., a fan, a shoe, a dress, a chair, a ship, a navigational instrument, or a map, and build a series of artworks around them to show how they were used. Artstor image groups can enhance students’ experience of art history by giving them the tools to create their own interdisciplinary and cross-cultural bodies of knowledge.

Some search topics:

• Portraits of important men and women: aspirational clothing
• Genre images of scholars and scientists: idealized/stereotyping clothing
• Asian representations of Dutch and English traders
• Sericulture in Japan
• Indian textiles, showing both native patterns and later patterns “westernized” for export back to Europe
• European-made textiles and clothing based on Asian designs
• Ships, maps, and instruments: the technology behind the textile trade

John Frederick Kensett | Lake George, 1869 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Susan Dodge-Peters Daiss
McPherson Director of Education
Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester

The idea of bringing works of art to the bedside of patients in the hospital emerged from two interwoven aspects of my professional life: for over 25 years, I have worked as a museum educator at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. I have also been trained and have served as a hospital and hospice chaplain. During my experiences as a chaplain, I began to wonder: What if the energy encountering artwork in a museum could be transported to the bedside? What if the visual arts had the potential to bring more than decoration to medical settings? What if they could bring comfort—deep comfort, and maybe even more?

By Lera Boroditsky, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University

Paul Gauguin | Life and Death, 1891-1893 | Musée Khalil | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. http://www.artres.com

How do artists decide whether time, death, or liberty should be personified as male or female? One suggestion comes from linguistics.  For example, Roman Jakobson (1959) reports: “The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists: he did not realize that ‘sin’ is feminine in German (die Sünde), but masculine in Russian (грех).” Does the grammatical gender of nouns in an artist’s native language indeed predict the gender of personifications in art?

Keri Cronin

Department of Visual Arts faculty, Brock University

Albrecht Dürer, Hare (A Young Hare), 1502. Source Image and original data prErich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archivesovided by /ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com

In January 2011 I launched a new senior-level undergraduate course called “Picturing Animals.” This is a research-intensive course that explores the history of visual culture through a thematic focus on representations of nonhuman animals. From Albrecht Dürer to Damien Hirst, we take a critical look at how and why artists have chosen to represent the animal body at various points in human history. Through discussions, readings and presentations we then situate these art histories in a broader visual context by considering other related instances in which the animal body plays a dominant visual role, including science, natural history, religion, animal welfare activism, the entertainment industry, and fashion.

I often draw on Artstor in preparation for these classes, as the range of images available in this database is broad and interdisciplinary. For this class I need to go beyond “Fine Art”-type images and this is where I find Artstor to be particularly useful. In addition to Landseer, Bonheur, Stubbs and other famous animal painters, I can also find editorial cartoons, tapestries, circus posters and scientific images in Artstor. It is easy to bring these different kinds of images together for critical analysis and discussion using image groups and folders.

Giovanni Francesco Castiglione, A Congress of Animals, 1641-1710. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pieter Boel, Views of a Porcupine, c. 1669-1671. Musée des Beaux Arts, Rennes, France. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Albrecht Dürer, Hare (A Young Hare), 1502. Graphische Sammlung Albertina. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Elsa Schiaparelli, Coat, Evening 1931-1932. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Eadweard J. Muybridge , Trotting; sulky; breaking to gallop; sorrel mare, Flode Holden, ca. 1884 - 1887. George Eastman House

One particularly interesting set of discussions we have had in this course is the use of the animal body as a component in the production of art and visual culture. Here, for example, we contrast the ways in which artists like Damien Hirst or Mark Dion incorporate animal bodies directly into their works with the history of animal bodies in artists’ materials (e.g.: dyes and pigments derived from cochineal insects). For this class I was delighted to find examples of clothing dyed with cochineal in the Artstor database.

In another instance we looked at the historical differences (and similarities!) that exist in the use of imagery by animal welfare/rights activists. We looked, for instance, at the ways in which groups such as the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection or the Massachusetts SPCA recontextualized such well-known images as Sir Edwin Landseer’s A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society. In that same discussion, we analyzed some of the recent photographic campaigns produced by PETA.

One of the major assignments in this course is a 20 page research paper on some aspect of “Picturing Animals.” The students in the inaugural run of this course have done a phenomenal job of coming up with diverse research topics reflective of course themes. In many instances, the students were able to develop their topic through exploring imagery in Artstor, taking, for example, a term or an image from class discussions and using that as a keyword in the database to find related material.

In short, Artstor is a valuable tool for interdisciplinary courses because of both the range of material available in the database and the functionality of such features as “Advanced Search” and the ability to make image groups.

Elizabeth Perkins

Columbia University graduate student

While reading through conservation records at the National Gallery in Washington, I found many references to Giovanni Bellini’s fingerprints all over the faces in his portraits. I squinted and stared in the gallery, but despite my best efforts and the indulgence of a lenient security guard, I could not get close enough. Returning home and finding a fantastic image of Bellini’s Portrait of a Young Man on Artstor, I finally saw those fingerprints, and they took my breath away. As a developing scholar, the resources that Artstor provides allows me follow up in way that was not possible for earlier generations of art historians.

Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1490. The National Gallery of Art.

Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1490. The National Gallery of Art.

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434. National Gallery, London. Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434. National Gallery, London. Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Jan van Eyck, Man in a Red Turban, 1433. National Gallery, London. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Jan van Eyck, Man in a Red Turban, 1433. National Gallery, London. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Agnolo Bronzino, Ritratto di Lucrezia Panciatichi, c. 1540. Galleria degli Uffizi. (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence / ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Agnolo Bronzino, Ritratto di Lucrezia Panciatichi, c. 1540. Galleria degli Uffizi. (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence / ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

When I began designing an undergraduate course on Renaissance portraiture for Columbia’s summer session in 2010, I was pleased to find a wealth of high resolution images to teach from on Artstor. Given the incredible quality of the images from collections like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, would the students avoid entering the actual museum? Would they be content with the images on their computer screens? I could not help but fear that I would have to make a case for looking at “real” paintings. My initial fears were soon put to rest, for Artstor itself made the case for me.

We met at Metropolitan Museum of Art on the second day of class. Each student chose two portraits for class presentations, and I instructed them to get to know their paintings, both in the museum and through the images on Artstor. The combination of in-person and at-home viewing produced extraordinary results. It engendered a number of aha! moments for the students, as the students were given two modes of accessing their works of art. They learned how to look closely and discern aspects of a painting’s history from its very surface. The ability to save a detailed view of an image was enormously helpful; at home students could save specific details to present in class. Rather than flipping quickly through slides, we moved slowly about the paintings, one inch at a time. Through close examination of the paint itself, we made connections between Italy and northern Europe, portraiture and religious works.

The students noticed how Antonello da Messina altered way he painted flesh in the dead Christ and the living; they observed how Giovanni Bellini changed his style from bold to a softly blended layers of oil. We confronted difficult issues of style, and were able to acknowledge how sometimes a damaged area can change the overall appearance of a painting. When we came to Giovanni Bellini, they were no less amazed than I was by the resolution of that image. In an interesting twist, the best images on Artstor encouraged a healthy and irreversible dissatisfaction with two-dimensional reproductions. Having seen a five-hundred-year-old fingerprint, my students could not wait to get out of my classroom and back to the museum, to the real things, and I could not have been happier about it.

Julia Reinhard Lupton

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, The University of California, Irvine

With its extraordinary image collection and sensitive search functions, Artstor has changed the way I teach Shakespeare. Images of the Globe Theater and panoramic maps of Elizabethan London set the stage for our engagement with the plays. When teaching The Merchant of Venice and Othello, I use paintings by Venetian artists to introduce students to this city of canals, carnival, and liturgical spectacle. Ignazio Danti’s full-color map provides an aerial view of the city in Shakespeare’s century. Veronese’s Wedding at Cana puts the cosmopolitan world of sixteenth-century Venice on extravagant display, with an African cup-bearer, turbaned Turks and Moors, court musicians, fantastical wedding costumes, and a stage-like setting. Gentile Bellini’s Procession in Piazza San Marco graphs the political and theological axes of public pageantry in Renaissance Venice. A thoughtful illumination of a man and woman dressed for carnival gives further insight into the Venetian theater of life. Jacob de Barbari’s woodcut map of Venice provides a detail of the Jewish ghetto, which I supplement with photographs of the ghetto today. Images of Epiphany kings represent noble Africans as members of a Pauline community, a theme tapped by Shakespeare in Othello.

Sandro Botticelli, The Third Episode of the Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, 1483. (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence / ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Jacopo del Sellaio, Banquet of Ahasuerus, c. 1490. Galleria degli Uffizi .(c) 2006, SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Venice: Map of City, 16th C

Globe Theatre (Southwark, London, England), Ref.: development 1580-90(i): possible intermediate steps in the early development of English theaters

Paolo Veronese, Marriage at Cana; detail, 1563. Musée du Louvre. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

When I teach A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Winter’s Tale, I develop the extensive analogies between the metamorphic, seasonal, and amatory mythologies of Shakespeare’s plays and Botticelli’s Primavera. All three works display the glorious weave of holiday celebration, natural history, mythography, and courtship narratives in the Renaissance society of festival. I supplement Botticelli with examples of medieval and Renaissance calendar art. We also discuss the cassone tradition (marriage chests painted with mythological scenes) and their relevance to both the artistic output of Botticelli and the ways in which humanists and artisans in northern Europe wove classical mythology into the décor of daily life through tapestries, embroideries, and other household objects.

The Taming of the Shrew draws on falconry and animal husbandry discourses, which I introduce to students through medieval falconry guides. I also fill out Shakespeare’s bestiary with images of the hunt and animal social life.

I illuminate Richard II through the Wilton Diptych, a portable votive portrait depicting the coronation of the King by Mary and a host of angels. The painting demonstrates the power of political theology in Richard’s lifetime, tropes that Shakespeare both takes apart and rebuilds over the course of his play.

Banquets figure as settings for key scenes in plays as diverse as Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens, and The Taming of the Shrew. At court, Shakespeare’s plays were performed in banqueting houses. Images of Renaissance banquets bring to life the intimate relationship between hospitality, commensality and theater in the Renaissance.

Finally, in addition to these more historical and illustrative uses of visual art, I design backdrops for student readings of scenes from Shakespeare using Artstor images (often updated in Photoshop). By projecting the images against a screen, I can create instant environments for our in-class performances, greatly enhancing student learning and experience.

Colette Apelian
Fine Art faculty, Berkeley City College

As the Islamic art historian in the Art Department of Berkeley City College (BCC), I explain how North African to South Asian art and architecture are relevant to design students less familiar with pre-modern and non-western material cultures. Course logistics add to the challenge. Art 48VR, Introduction to Islamic Art History, is one of the few, if not the only online survey of Islamic art presented to a community college audience. To better address student needs, I organize the class thematically rather than chronologically, and focus upon a carefully chosen combination of fine and utilitarian objects and buildings. Presentations must be compressed so that BCC’s course management system, Moodle, properly stores and displays them. An example of how I use Artstor in Art 48VR can be viewed in one image group for the lecture “Architectural Solutions to Climate Problems in the Islamic World.”

Reed building screen, detail, Morocco. Image: 1982. Image and original data provided by Walter B. Denny

Bagh-e Fin, exterior, through screen of entrance portal, toward court. Image: 1978. Image and original data provided by Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom

Alhambra Palace - (Partal Gardens), Granada, Spain, Main construction 14th century. Image and original data provided by Shmuel Magal, Sites and Photos

'Alawi Abu Bakr al-Kaf, Dar al-Salam, Exterior, Image: 2005. Tarim, the Hadramaut Valley, Yemen. James Conlon: Mali and Yemen Sites and Architecture

Alhambra Palace - (Generalife Market Garden),Granada, Spain. Begun in the early 14th century, redecorated in 1313-1324. Image and original data provided by Shmuel Magal, Sites and Photos

In addition to illustrating specific motifs, pictures in the group show technology, materials, and plans that naturally temper hot and dry conditions. There are reed, mud brick, stone, and wooden screens (musharabiyya and jails, among other terms), which are used to mitigate the sun’s glare and heat in North African, Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and Indian contexts. Screens also allow air to flow freely while preserving privacy and demarcating private and religious spaces from public and secular locales. There is an Iranian badgir (wind tower) at Mir Chaqmaq (1436-37 CE) that, without electricity, circulates fresh and cool air through multi-story structures. An example from the United Arab Emirates indicates how the idea spread. The image group additionally has historic to contemporary mud brick architecture from Egypt and Yemen. Mud brick insulates interiors from excessive heat and cold, uses inexpensive local resources, and can been crafted into a multitude of styles, including quasi-Rococo and neo-Classical in some Yemeni examples. Images of the Alhambra in Spain, Bagh-e Fin in Iran, and the Sahrij Madrassa in Morocco display architects’ and engineers’ use of water channels, pools, and fountains to cool and hydrate. Medieval waterwheels and a recent qanat demonstrate more methods to harness natural power and supply water. In Egypt and Morocco, central courtyard planned structures and narrow urban streets flanked by windowless buildings cool private and public spaces while providing light, seclusion, and ventilation.

Artstor has helped me create digital bridges between students, subject matter, and Moodle in other ways. I have most appreciated the ability to create presentations in OIV 3.1. After organizing and downloading an image group to my laptop, OIV allows me to create a slide show quickly complete with captions and copyright information. The opportunity to choose compression levels means few size problems when uploading to the course website. Artstor’s varied content has also helped me be more efficient. I can find most of the images I need in one location without additional searches, imports, and scans.