#fineartslibrary

Slides were used to teach history of art and architecture since around 1880s until they were replaced by digital modes such as PowerPoint. Since the founding of the Fogg Art Museum in 1895, the Fine Arts Library has served the needs of teaching faculty, art museum staff, undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and historians at Harvard and around the world. By 1920s, many universities had slide libraries, including Harvard. Since then, over the decades, FAL has acquired over 600,000 slides, mainly from the courses taught by Harvard faculty for teaching.

In the past couple years, the Fine Arts Library’s Digital Images and Slides Collection has been engaged in a large-scale move of our 35 mm slides to off-site storage at the Harvard Depository. 

This collection of over 600,000 slides documents the history of world art and architecture up to the early 2000s. Access for retrieval of items needed by future researchers is being provided through creating HOLLIS records. We have digitized most of the slides, but the archiving of this significant teaching format, nearly in its original arrangement, will serve as a valuable record both of the past art historical interests of faculty and students, and as a tangible reminder of bygone classroom teaching practices.

This facsimile of The Royal Psalter of Sainte-Chapelle, an illuminated manuscript originally made in Paris in the early thirteenth century, is filled with a delightful variety of geometric, floral, and zoomorphic line fillers.

Medieval scribes and artists filled the empty space between lines with humor, providing a break from often serious texts and also creating visual balance and symmetry. We suspect that they must have had a lot of fun creating these quirky creatures.

The Fine Arts Library holds a collection of over 300 full-color facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts from a wide range of periods and traditions. The collection primarily includes religious texts, but representatives of secular works on poetry and literature, astronomy, travel, sketchbooks, and science and medicine are also included.

February is also National Embroidery Month, and we’re excited to show you some cool items we have in the Special Collections. The first one is a hand-embroidered canvas book made by Candace Hicks who collects coincidences from the books she reads and gathers them in her artists’ books and installations.

Hicks created a variant series of hand-embroidered books, copying the form and design of dime-store "composition" books. In this volume, Hicks kept a record of coincidences in the books she was reading and noted every time the word “coincidence” occurred.

Happy New Year! 2026 is Year of the Horse.

Horse is confident, agreeable, and responsible. They’re also energetic, intelligent, and fit.

What kind of horse are you going to be for the new year?

Editing photographs wasn’t so easy before the advent of the smartphone or Photoshop, but people always found a way to alter images. Our current display entitled “Trying to Forget: The Removal of Figures from Early Photographic Images,” guest curated by Madison Brown, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Curatorial Fellow in Photography at Harvard Art Museums, examines our desire to forget or erase certain memories. Madison selected examples that show the creative and sometimes laborious modes of alteration in early photographic work. Some tintype photos, as shown in this post, figures carved out with shears or faces roughly scratched out. These scratches and rough edges only highlight the very act of erasure, rather than achieving a complete annihilation of memory.

These objects from Special Collections at the Fine Arts Library demonstrate an enduring desire to forget, as well as the persistence of visual evidence that often forces us to remember.

The Fine Arts Library is open to all Harvard ID holders. We recently switched out tintypes and turned pages in the case, so check out the new images currently on display!

Happy Holi to those who are celebrating this holiday.

Holi is celebrated to mark the arrival of spring and a time for new beginnings.

The traditional color for Holi was made from the leaves of the ‘tesu’ tree (Butea monosperma), which is known as the ‘flame of the forest’ and produces bright red flowers. They are dried and grounded to give a saffron color when mixed with water. The yellow power was probably turmeric, and the red dye may be red sandalwood powder. (summarized from V&A website)

Today, the range of colors used for Holi include reds and yellows, and also blues and greens. It’s the Festival of Colors!

June is National Pollinator Month, brining attention to the importance of relationship between pollinators and plants, and our dependency on plants for oxygen and as primary food source.

This engraving was created by the artist Paul Revere in 1774. Revere was a silversmith, engraving artist, and prosperous Bostonian who was also a military officer and industrialist. He became famous for his role in a midnight ride in 1775 to alert nearby minutemen of the approach of British troops at the beginning of the American Revolutionary War in Massachusetts.

The tintype was an early photographic process that produces a direct positive image on a thin sheet of lacquered iron (not tin). These are unique images produced without the need for a negative. Tintypes were extremely popular from the 1850s through the early 1910s.