Web Gallery of Art
Encyclopedia
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
website. It displays historic European visual art, mainly from the Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
, Gothic
Gothic art
Gothic art was a Medieval art movement that developed in France out of Romanesque art in the mid-12th century, led by the concurrent development of Gothic architecture. It spread to all of Western Europe, but took over art more completely north of the Alps, never quite effacing more classical...
and Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
periods.
The website contains reproductions of over 26,000 works and includes accompanying text on the artworks and artists, accessible through a searchable database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
. The site is a leading example of an independently established collection of high-quality historically important pictures.
The viewer can select the size of the image; associated music is also included to accompany viewing, and posters of displayed artworks are available. The facility was created by Emil Kren and Daniel Marx.
Copyrights
Most of the images in the gallery are of works that are out of copyrightCopyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
. However copyright may exist in the reproductions, within some legal systems. The Gallery itself gives the following copyright statement: "The Web Gallery of Art is copyrighted as a database. Images and documents downloaded from this database can only be used for educational and personal purposes. Distribution of the images in any form is prohibited without the authorization of their legal owner". In general no information is given on the pages presenting the images, as to who the legal owner of each might be. In the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
copyright would not exist in the reproductions of those images that are themselves in the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
, following the decision in the case of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.
Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.
Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 , was a decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright in the United States because the copies lack...
; a similar situation exists in some other jurisdictions but not all.
The texts used to describe the works, are often, or usually, taken without acknowledgement from published works by art historians, apparently often in breach of copyright. For example, the texts used to describe prints by Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer was a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since...
are taken wholesale from: Kurth, Willi. The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Durer, Dover Books, New York, 1963, and Strauss, Walter L. The Complete Engravings, Etchings and Drypoints of Albrecht Durer, Dover Books, New York, 1972.