Hi Amy! I am really stuck on my research for my final Renaissance paper. I was wondering if you could recommend any dependable methods for finding primary sources beside Googling and using WorldCat?
Absolutely! Here are a list of things I use almost daily:
The Getty Research Portal, which publishes rare art history documents.
Archive.org, which is often a goldmine with some persistence. I have found some incredible Renaissance & Baroque era Italian publications here.
Gallica, the searchable database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France with over 2.5 million documents. If a document you want has been translated into French (or is French in the first place), you’ll probably find it here.
The British Library’s Incunable Short Title Catalogue, which you may need institutional access to, is a database of digitized incunables made before 1500. As with Gallica, if a document has been translated into English, it might be here. This is also true of:
Early English Books Online, to quote the description: “contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.” If you have $25 to spare you can sign up for a Renaissance Society of America membership, which now offers access to this resource for members. Incidentally, if your library already offers this resource, then that’s even better.
Edit: This is slightly past the Renaissance, but it's such an amazing thing to finally happen for Italian art historians that I had to include it. Getty Publications recently published the first ever full-text English translation of Gabriele Paleotti's Discourse on Sacred & Profane Images, a defining text for artistic production in the late sixteenth & seventeenth centuries.
