AH 345: Caravaggio
Humanities Liaison Librarian
- Steve Lawson
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off the Map Room) - (719) 389-6857
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This guide prepared for the block five, 2011 course taught by Rebecca Tucker.
Context
Many of the critical approaches you may wish to use necessitate putting the work of art in a greater context.
The Grove Dictionary Of Art Online can help you put Caravaggio’s work in an art-historical context and can supply keywords for researching the period.
Use broad keywords from your reading to search TIGER, the CC library catalog. Refine those searches by adding keywords or looking at the subject headings on interesting books to find similar works.
Of the many subject-specific databases that may help you locate useful articles, JSTOR and Historical Abstracts are likely places to start. Since you will be searching full-text and abstracts, you may want to use more specific keywords, or a larger group of keywords to keep from finding too many irrelevant hits.
Theory and Criticism
Books and overviews
You could do worse than to pick up one of these books for examples of your favorite critical school in action.
D’Alleva notes that many art historical critical methods have been borrowed or adapted from literary critical schools. The Johns Hopkins Guide To Literary Theory & Criticism can provide overviews of some schools of thought as well as critical bio-bibliographies for individual theorists.
Databases for criticism
The databases we use to find criticism haven’t changed from Intro to Art History, but the techniques have.
- Art & Architecture Complete
- Coverage: 1980 - current
- Provides indexing and abstracts for more than 730 academic journals, magazines and trade publications with full text for over 330 periodicals and 215 books, as well as selective coverage for over 70 publications, and an Image Collection of over 64,000 images.
- International Bibliography Of Art (IBA)
- Coverage: 2008-current
- Bibliographic database of international scholarly literature on western art. Subjects include fine arts in all media, decorative arts, museum studies, archaeology, folk art, material culture, classical studies, antiques, and architectural history. IBA is the successor to the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA).
- Bibliography Of The History Of Art
- Coverage: 1973 - 2010
- Covers Western art from Antiquity to the present. Indexes more sources than Art Abstracts, but does not cover Asian art, and does not have full text articles. No longer updated.
It is easy enough to search on “Caravaggio” and/or the title of the work you are writing about. But finding articles from a particular critical approach will take more work.