Biblical Art on the WWW

 

Biblical Art on the WWW

The aim of this site is to provide a helpful assistant in the search for biblical art on the Internet. I hope that my contribution will prove helpful to people working with preaching, teaching etc.

History

It started as a Powerpoint presentation for personal use. I made a chronological division of the Bible into subjects, each subject being a scene or an episode from the biblical history. Then I downloaded relevant art from the Web, carefully connecting each artwork to the correct subject.

Two main problems halted this project: It was not useful to others than myself, and it grew very big very fast. To solve the first problem, I started to consider making an Internet site. As for the second problem, and also for the risk of copyright violations, I soon realized that hosting images was out of the question. Then came the idea of collecting and arranging links to images of biblical artwork hosted by other sites, using the chronological division already at hand.

I ended up with my site being about 1000 html-pages linked together, and a huge maintenance problem! So, I decided to ask my data-expert wife to make me a database.

Content

The main content of the present version of my site is a database accompanied by a collection of thumbnail pictures. I'm building the base scanning sites hosting images of biblical artwork, registering each work with title, artist(s), time of execution, technique/material, and location (the last three only if available; normally no location for prints, like etchings, woodcuts etc.).

When registering an artwork found on the Internet, I usually enter the information given by the host without further investigations. This means that my base may have errors not originating from me. So, I disclaim responsibility as to this kind of errors.

The core of the base is an updated edition of the chronological division mentioned above. All artworks are connected to one or several subjects, and to comprise all works in some way related to the Bible, the subject list includes portraits, and even non-biblical incidents and situations where biblical characters play a role.

Finally, the base normally contains links to the registered artworks.

Please visit the statistics page for some curiosities!