Art history at a mouse click

How many art historians does it take to write a timeline of art history? At least 100 if the project is taking place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Over the last five years, the education department at the Met has worked with dozens of curators from 18 different departments to create a wide-ranging Web-based chronology of visual and material culture, spanning the globe from Mexico to Malaysia and crisscrossing diverse fields. An early version of the timeline, beginning around 20,000 B.C., was posted on the Met's Web site (www.metmuseum.org/toah) four years ago. In October, the museum announced that the timeline has at last reached the present day, with new material covering 1800 to 2004.

Funded by New York philanthropists Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn, the timeline has been a pet project of museum director Philippe de Montebello. Unlike the typical printed encyclopedia, organized solely by topic, the timeline has several points of entry, including geography as well as chronology. Click on a country or time period to access some 5,000 images (mainly drawn from the Met's collection) and some 750 short thematic essays, on everything from Mesopotamian tablets to Italian fresco painting to the latest Dusseldorf photography.

Of course, assembling and editing entries from so many curators was no easy task. "Herding cats is not a bad metaphor for what we've been doing," says associate director of education Kent Lydecker. "I can't think of any other project here at the museum that has drawn so many people into the process, inspiring such great discussion and debate."

Points of disagreement can be as informative as the timeline itself, highlighting unsettled areas in art history. For example, Lydecker relates, the ending date of the Tang dynasty was revised slightly, from 907 to 906 A.D., because of research for the Met's current exhibition "China: Dawn of a Golden Age." And the treatment of Byzantium, which involved curators from Islamic as well as medieval art, reflects a new, broader understanding of the empire's geopolitical reach.

As scholarship and clarifications evolve further, Lydecker says, the timeline will change. In this way, it is a perpetual work in progress. Plans for 2005 are to flesh out key topics by adding more images and essays. The education department will offer teacher training sessions at various conferences, and Lydecker himself will deliver a presentation on the timeline at the College Art Association meeting in Atlanta this February.

Currently, the timeline logs about 8,000 hits a day (compared to 14,000 daily visitors who climb the museum's steps), with teachers and students leading the way. That figure does not include users inside the museum. "I use it frequently," says de Montebello, who recently went on-line while preparing his talk for the reopening of the Met's Old Kingdom tombs in the Egyptian art galleries. He needed to brush up on his pharaohs.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group