Images of Greek and Roman Sculpture
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Images of Greek and Roman Sculpture is being constructed as a web site to support a course on Greek and Roman sculpture offered by the Department of Art and taught by Susan Kane. The course, 222 Greek and Roman Sculpture, is a study of the origins and development of Greek and Roman sculpture. Special emphasis is given to the study of its place in the development of figural art. The web site will serve primarily as an "image reserve." The site currently contains about 425 images. About one third of the images were scanned in house from slides housed in the Department slide library. Except for a handful of images downloaded from the Internet, the remainder of the images were obtained from Art Images for College Teaching (AICT), a royalty free archive of public domain images managed by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and originally photographed by Allan Kohl, photographer, art historian, and visual resources curator.
The site is organized as a set of interlinked directories and image pages. The directory pages are always yellow and link to either other directories or discrete image pages. The image pages have white backgrounds and link to full screen images by clicking on thumbnail images or textual links. Each full screen image in JPG format is encapsulated in a simple html file which serves to center the image against a black background. The full screen images, approximately 768 x 512 pixels, are only accessible within the parameters of Oberlin College. However, the directories, image pages, and thumbnails*, 96 x 72 pixels, are viewable anywhere. For archival purposes, each image has a corresponding larger file, 1536 x 1024 pixels, stored off site in TIFF format.
Images of Greek and Roman Sculpture contains images of freestanding figural sculpture, relief sculpture such as grave steles, and architectural sculpture. But the emphasis is with figural sculpture as described in the course description. We plan to add about another hundred images to the site before the end of the spring 99 semester. The site will be evaluated and any feedback is welcome. If the site proves useful to Ms. Kane and the students of ARH 222, we will seek support from Oberlin College to expand our efforts into other areas.
Joseph Romano, Department of Art
* It was determined through the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU), convened by the National Information Infrastructure (NII) Task Force in 1994, that low resolution thumbnail images are considered fair use for network delivery on the Internet because they have virtually no commercial value.