Music iconographies

Iconography refers to the study of emblems, portraits and other pictorial works in visual symbolism and factual research (Grove Music Online 2014). Use this page to find iconographies for your music research.

• RIdIM
  • An international index of visual sources of music, dance, theatre, and opera
  • Wide scope of visual documents and artifacts, including architecture, performance art, videos as well as paintings, drawings, and sculptures
  • Contains descriptions and images of visual objects; search for images using controlled vocabulary terms or keywords (e.g., names of artists and musicians, musical instruments, titles, art media, date of creation, and owning institutions)
  • Often includes images unless protected by copyright
• Early Music Sources Iconography Database
  • Contains images that depict music-making and performance practices from various eras
  • Offers the ability to filter and search by instrument, century, and category
  • Includes videos, as well as English translations of neglected sources
• ARTstor
  • Contains high quality images with metadata from museums, archives, art collections, and reliable sources
  • Right-cleared/open access for use in presentations, assignments, and other educational and research use
  • Supports zoom in, as well as compare and contrast images side by side
• Image resources - Find & Understand Images
  • A McGill Library guide highlighting both McGill-subscribed and free online image resources
  • Provides information on copyright and images in Canada

RCMI Inventories of Music Iconography

• A series of books containing pre-20th century artworks that include musical images
• Focuses on artworks found in US art museums. Five volumes published so far

• MIMO database (Organology for specific instruments in public collections)
  • Includes information and images of historical musical instruments held in museum collections
  • Primarily based in Europe, but also includes collections from the United States, China, South Korea, Burkina Faso, Republic of Congo, and Equatorial Guinea
  • Browse instruments by type, place of production, date of production, instrument maker, or the museum in which the instrument is held

• Iconclass
  • A classification system that provides subject access to the content of images and is widely used by museums, libraries, and databases, including RIdIM
  • Offers a dataset of images, bibliographies, and links to resource. Note that bibliographic references are only available for consortium members
  • Supports browsing, keyword searching, and AI search for a pattern match
  • Register for a free account to use features
  • Refer to the Help section for an elaborated how-to guide

Search the Sofia Discovery tool for McGill's collection of resources: books, journals & articles, multimedia, and other resources, in both print or electronic format.

In addition/alternative to combining keywords in searches, conducting a subject search using the subject headings below can be useful to enhance precision and get more relevant results.

• su:("art and music")
• su:(music*) AND su:(iconography)
• su:(music*) AND su:("pictorial works")
• su:(music*) AND su:(portraits)
• su:("music in art")
• su:("musical instruments in art")

• McGill users only
• Open access resource
• Free resource
• In-library use
• Catalogue record