Featured Museum Site
June, 1999
Carol Gerten's Fine Art Antonio Canova Perseus with the Head of Medusa (detail) |
I began the Artcyclopedia because I believe in the potential of the Internet to display great art - to capture the essence of a piece and to provide a satisfying experience in itself, in the same way that a book can. |
| While many museums have good reproductions of some of their artworks online, the really great scans seem to come from two "image archives": Mark Harden's Artchive, and Carol Gerten's Fine Art. I give a slight edge to CGFA for these reasons: (1) it has about 4X the artists that the Artchive does, and (2) most of the really luminously stunning reproductions I can recall seeing have been from her site. |
 Albrecht Dürer Self-Portrait in a Fur Coat (detail) |
 Albert Bierstadt Sunset in the Yosemite Valley (detail) |
One thing I admire about Carol is that she wasn't afraid to be far ahead of her time. Her site has been up for three years, but only recently has the desktop technology required to really appreciate works of this quality been in widespread use. The limiting factors I am thinking of are bandwidth, monitor size, and colors available in the video palette. I remember first visiting her site via a 14.4K modem. The images on this page are details of images which can be seen on CGFA. Click on the image or the artist/title in order to see the full online artworks, which are about 4 times as large. |
| In all, CGFA contains about 6,000 works by 1,000 artists. The site hasn't been added to in a few months, but here's hoping Carol will keep growing it. P.S. If you find the site slow, there are a dozen or so mirrors sites around the world. Click here to find a site near you. |
 Anselm Feuerbach Iphigenia (detail) |
