Why (some) art historians are evil

Today I spent far too much time finding the right early modern images for an upcoming assignment we’re giving. The problem wasn’t with the images themselves. I knew which images I wanted. I have copies of the images. I've used these images before in teaching. But this time I needed to send students to sources in the Newberry Library that would contain the images in their original context. This should be easy enough with engravings and woodcuts because the majority of them were made to be part of a book, whether as a frontispiece or illustration. What I discovered, however, is that art historians (the ones mostly responsible for commenting on and curating images) are not very interested in which book a woodcut or engraving originally appeared in. With an image in hand, I could easily enough find out the artist and the date (even a completely detached image can be reunited with some details using tineye.com). I could usually find lengthy discussions of the artist, when that was in doubt, as it often is with prints. But even good secondary sources often stopped after citing a print’s artist and date. At least with paintings scholars sometimes will indicate which museum holds the actual painting or whether it is in a (dreaded) “private collection.” But this information is useless for prints. It’s nice to know that a particular library has a copy of a print… carefully cut out of a book which has then been discarded and forgotten at some remote point in the past. So the art historians were my villains this afternoon. My hero? 19th-century antiquarians. These are the people who could spend years meticulously cataloguing the original provenance of every print in a certain genre, including copying out every inscription and noting every variant. My other hero, my enabler, my friar Lawrence, was Google Books, through whom 19th-century historians live again in all their public-domain-and-copyright-free glory.