The ARTstor Digital Library is intended to be a visual resource of value to scholars, teachers, and students all across the arts, humanities, and beyond. Whether you are an historian of art and architecture; a student or scholar in such fields as Anthropology, Archeology, Classics, History, Literature, Music, and Religion; engaged with Area Studies such as African Studies, Near Eastern Studies, or Asian Studies; or cultivating an interdisciplinary field such as African-American Studies, Visual Studies, or Women’s Studies – ARTstor hopes to offer you a valuable resource that will facilitate the integration of digital images into your teaching and scholarship. This handout is part of a growing series of documents intended to highlight the relevance of ARTstor to individual fields of study.

ARTstor Collections Relevant to the Study of Music

Several ARTstor collections will be of interest to students of music and its history. The Image Gallery, above all, offers innumerable portraits of composers over the centuries – from painted portraits of Bach to contemporary portrait photographs of Bob Dylan and Bob Geldof – as well as scores of images of historic musical instruments, paintings and photographs of ballet and opera sets and photographic documentation of musical performance venues such as concert halls and opera houses – also well represented in the Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts. Musical scores are also represented, ranging from medieval manuscripts of compositions by Guillaume de Machaut to the oldest surviving manuscript by Bach.

Musical iconography is also richly represented in ARTstor, both in the Image Gallery and – especially – among the more than 55,000 prints (engravings, etchings, woodcuts etc.) from The Illustrated Bartsch. This digital version of the nearly 100-volume print reference corpus offers a broad and deep overview of the visual culture of early modern Europe from the 15th to the early 19th century. The scholarly cataloging and commentaries that accompany the images lend themselves to keyword searching by iconography. A keyword search for “lute” (for example) produces 31 prints illustrating the lute, from 15th century Germany to 16th century Italy to the Dutch Baroque. And a search for “Apollo” and “lyre” produces 22 images. “Musician(s)” results in 59 images.

Women in music are especially richly represented in the Schlesinger History of Women in America Collection. A keyword search on “musicians” retrieves no fewer than 536 images, ranging from photographs of Girl Scout drum and bugle corps to Duke Ellington in concert, captured by a prolific woman photographer.

Helpful Search Tips

Keyword searches are likely to be most successful. Truncating your search term (music* or musician*) in order to retrieve terms with variant endings will enlarge your search results. For more precise searches, use the ARTstor Advanced Search feature.

Helpful Browsing categories

The Image Gallery has a broad browsing category for Music, which retrieves more than 300 related images.

Information on this page comes from an ARTstor publication