Art Historical Research Terms

Terms to Know:

Catalogue raisonné: systematic list of an artist's known works. For each work, the catalog entry gives title, dimensions, medium, probably date of completion, current location, list of exhibitions in which the work has been shown, provenance (i.e., the list of owners), bibliography (i.e., sources that mention the work), and any additional pertinent information. See also oeuvre catalog. A good resource for identifying CRs is Wolfgang Freitag's Art Books: a Basic Bibliography of Monographs on Artists (1997); another is the Grove Dictionary of Art (print and online.)

Collection catalog: list of works owned by a particular person or museum. May include information such as dimensions, medium, provenance, probable date of completion, bibliography, and often a reproduction.

Corpus (plural, corpora): multi-volume, exhaustive collection of research on a specific subject or type of monument. Because they are so large, they should be organized rationally. You may need to know something about the subject before you can use the corpus effectively. Examples: Corpus Vitrearum (stained glass) and Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (ancient vase painting)

Exhibition catalog: list of works assembled for a one-time show, often an occasion for publishing new scholarship or a re-evaluation of a particular topic. The amount of information provided about each work and the number of reproductions included varies. Smaller (pamphlet-size) exhibition catalogs are often uncataloged, located in our Artists File by artist. If there is no catalog for an exhibition you may still find exhibition reviews in newspapers and periodicals. Retrospective exhibitions survey an artist's work to that point in time and are valuable research sources.

Festschrift (plural, festschriften): a collection of essays written in honor of a person or institution. Two useful bibliographies of festschriften include
Festschriften in Art History, 1960-1975: bibliography and index (1988) and
Kunstgeschichte in Festschriften (1962.) You may also search BHA using festschriften as a category. Festschriften often include useful information on the honoree.

Monograph: a treatise on any one subject or artist, essentially a book.

Oeuvre catalogue: may include all known works by an artist, but may not give as much information for each as a catalogue raisonné.

Symposium, Colloquium, Congress, and Conference papers: papers that were presented at one of these events, and published together. Usually relating to a specific topic, BHA may be useful in identifying these.

Finally, as you engage in research include foreign language works even if you do not read that language; there is much useful decipherable information, such as bibliographies and plates. Foreign titles sometimes include summaries in English.