The art collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna launched their new web portal "Collections Online" on August 30, 2024. It contains the most important information and image data on around 9,000 objects from all three art collections - the Picture Gallery, the Museum of Prints and Drawings and the Glyptothek - which are now accessible online for the first time.
"We have made great progress in making our collections visible, accessible and researchable," says Dr Sabine Folie, Director of the Art Collections, happily, adding: "This is also the overdue start to the complete digitization of this federal collection over the next few years. We are delighted and invite you to browse through our treasures!"
The Picture Gallery is represented with a large part of its collection. In addition to the highlights of Flemish, Dutch and Italian painting, such as paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian and Guardi, rarely shown works from these schools and Austrian painting are now also available. Representative pieces from the Glyptothek collection from different eras are included, including the cast of Michelangelo's Pietà and originals such as the ancient statue of Hera of Ephesus. Important blocks of works from the Kupferstichkabinett have been newly digitized, including the entire collection of Gothic architectural sketches (UNESCO World Documentary Heritage), old master drawings from the German, Dutch and Italian schools, stage designs by the Galli Bibiena family of artists, and watercolours from the Brazilian expedition of 1817/1818 by Thomas Ender, the partial estates of Joseph Anton Koch and Friedrich Gauermann, watercolors of flowers by Moritz Michael Daffinger, architectural drawings by Theophil von Hansen, prints by Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius and Rembrandt and a selection from the photographic collection with prints by Bisson Frères, Andreas Groll, Moriz Nähr and many more. Further groups of works will be added successively.
This important step in digitization was made possible by funding from the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport ("Kulturerbe digital"), which was used to finance a new museum database for the collections, the web portal, the production of image data and staff to process the published data, meaning that at least parts of these collections are now available to a broad public in the digital space without barriers.
