Works of art and historical artifcacts are PRIMARY SOURCES. They are direct evidence of human activity providing "'raw data' or evidence to you will use to develop, test, and ultimately justify your hypothesis or claim" (Booth et al, The Craft of Research, 4th edition, 66).
The Art in the Christian Tradition (ACT) database is a regularly updated visual image internet resource. Designed for scholars, students, pastors, and religious educators, all of the images may be used for non-commercial purposes, with attribution. There are currently 7045 images in the collection.
The collections include images and descriptive data related to the iconography of works of art produced between late Antiquity and the sixteenth century. Although the Index of Medieval Art was formerly known as the Index of Christian Art, it now includes secular subjects as well as a growing number of subjects from medieval Jewish and Muslim cultures.
This collection of images, specially selected for the Library of Catholic Thought from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, provide an overview of the history and visual culture of Roman Catholicism. The images focus on depictions of key figures and places in Catholic history, liturgical items, reliquaries and changing artistic depictions over time.
This digitization project of the Vatican Library aims to digitize the entire Library's collection of manuscripts: 80,000 codices (excluding the archival units) mostly from the Middle Age and Humanistic period.