From visual arts to rock, we recommend excellent resources for art-history research that promise hours of online enjoyment
The quality of information on the internet has generated much controversy. Yet serious projects offer important resources for research across many fields of knowledge. For this week’s Ouvir Imagens column on Rádio USP, I selected five timelines, with a focus on art history in its many forms of expression, from visual arts to music. All are excellent research resources and promise hours of online enjoyment.
I begin with a project called Historiography, which stands out less for its content, based entirely on Wikipedia, than for the way it works with superimposed layers of information. A multiple award winner in interface design, it lets you view events within a given period, isolate an event and see related ones across history, explore a particular occurrence in detail, or choose a subject—art, architecture, music, among others—and define time frames to browse.
In literature and books, the highlight is the British Library timeline, beginning in the year 1000 and continuing to the present. In addition to information on literary works and their authors, richly illustrated with high-quality reproductions, it offers cross-referenced information from letters, newspapers, scores, pamphlets… A feast for the eyes for anyone who, like me, loves printed matter, even in digital form.
More multimedia-oriented is the unmissable 100 Years of Rock timeline, which provides not only the names and birth dates of each style but also musical examples. Its best feature is its relational dimension: visual resources make the genealogies of each style comprehensible.
The most comprehensive timeline I know is the art-history timeline of New York’s Metropolitan Museum . Drawing on the museum’s collection, it creates a true visual encyclopedia combining critical essays, chronologies and photographs of artworks. The oldest works date to 8000 BCE, while the newest reach the 21st century. You can browse by geographic region, period, style, technique and subject.
Among Brazilian resources, I recommend the impeccable timeline on the equally impeccable Brasiliana Iconográficawebsite. It brings together drawings, watercolors, paintings, prints and printed materials from the collections of Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Instituto Moreira Salles, Pinacoteca de São Paulo and Instituto Itaú Cultural. The timeline conveys the richness of the portal. Alongside detailed information about individual works, you can place them in historical context and pursue other forms of research, cross-referencing subjects, collections and depicted locations, among other categories.
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