Caves to Cathedrals

The BBC and the British Museum have selected 100 objects through which to present a History of the World.  It is a great concept, and the website has a flash timeline with which you can scroll yourself out of prehistory and into the present.  Each object has some text, a zoomable image, supplementary images, and a podcast.  I hope to incorporate some of this material when I next teach Caves to Cathedrals.

Gardner’s Art through the Ages shares only three objects with the BBC/BM selection.

Number 12:  The Standard of Ur

Number 22:  Sphinx of Taharqo

Number 27:  Parthenon Sculpture, Centaur and Lapith

But, there are many objects very similar to something in Gardner’s that would well complement the textbook.  I will post a chapter-by-chapter list in the coming days.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

which includes photos from ElissaCS, whose photostream is  amazing, including multiple sets of the Met and other museums, and of major sites in Europe and elsewhere.  In fact now that I have discovered it, I will probably search for works here first, and more broadly later.

British Museum

Parthenon Marbles & The Acropolis Museum

Brooklyn Museum of Art

Highlights:

Pompeii: Objects and Places

Middle East: Ruins

North Africa: Ruins

Egyptian Lantern Slides – General Views & People

Egyptian Lantern Slides – Places

Rams & Sphinxes

I have discovered that a great source for photographs of church and other religious art, Sacred Destinations, now has a photostream on Flickr (I only mean to imply that it is more recent than when I last taught in the Spring of 2008).  I have found many photos for teaching on Sacred Destinations and always assumed that they were a travel agency, or something like that, but just by reading their “About Us”, I realize it is one individual and her husband.  Amazing.

I have just discovered Slideshare, a site expressly for the purpose of sharing of slideshows. In the past, I just uploaded Pdf versions of my powerpoints to Blackboard. But students invariably complained about how long these same files took to download. Slideshare is amazing! You can restrict access to your slideshow, and viewers can watch it on Slideshare or download the file. You can even embed the slideshow in a blog!

If you are interested, I invite you to connect to my secret URL, where you can see the slides for my first class on Paleolithic Art and the Chauvet Cave.

As I develop this site, I notice that while I find plenty of medieval blogs (my field of specialization), I find almost no art history blogs. 

Let me, then, draw attention to one written by the Director of the Walters Art Museum – Gary Vikan – called the Director’s Blog.  Dr. Vikan posts infrequently, but well.  I would appreciate to learn of any others!