Islamic Art & Architecture: Image sources

Gathers in one place the wealth of scholarly knowledge and resources generated by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, this site features a digital library with photographs, plans and descriptions of hundreds of buildings and sites, digitized journal articles, reference tools and other publications.

This collection contains over four thousand color slides and black and white photographs of medieval Spain taken by the late Eugene Casselman (1912-1996) during his thirty years of travel throughout the Iberian peninsula. The images span over one thousand years of architectural history, from the seventh to the seventeenth century. The majority of the slides focus on the Mudejar style, an ornate court style largely inspired by Spanish Islamic architecture that was shared among Islamic, Jewish, and Christian cultures during the later Middle Ages in Spain.

The Boston Public Library is in the process of scanning all three volumes of Friedrich Sarre's "Monuments of Persian architecture: historical investigation and records of Islamic brick buildings in the Near East and Persia."

A digital collection of Islamic manuscripts, published texts, and maps from across Harvard's libraries and museums dating from the 10th to the 20th centuries

Over 700 artistic works and documents. The Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA) started as an effort to document and preserve the modern artistic works from the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, most of which were lost and damaged in the fires and looting during the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. As the site shows, very little is known about many of the works, including their current whereabouts and their original location in the Museum. The lack of documents about modern Iraqi art prompted the growth of the project to include supporting text. The site makes the works of art available as an open access database in order to raise public awareness of the many lost works and to encourage interested individuals to participate in helping to document the museum’s original and/or lost holdings.

40,000+ historic and recent images of the Middle East and the Islamic world. The website requires registration but access is free.

The Aga Khan Museum collects art from historically significant Muslim civilizations as well as contemporary Muslim communities and diasporas. The core of its Permanent Collection spans a vast geographic area from Spain and North Africa in the west, across the Middle East, to South Asia and China in the east — was assembled by Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan (1933–2003). Today, it is the foundation of North America’s first museum dedicated exclusively to Islamic arts, where it is enhanced by superb objects from the private collections of Prince Amyn and His Highness the Aga Khan.

Collections have many works created during the Mughal Empire in India.

The British Museum has one of the largest collections of Islamic art available, many of which are in their "collections online," Enter "islam" or related terms to explore Islamic art at the British Museum.

Devotional and secular works from Islamic cultures express the dynamic history of the diverse peoples in Western, Central, South Asia, and around the Mediterranean. The Islamic holdings are especially strong in works on paper with calligraphies and illustrated literary manuscripts. Patterned tiles, ceramics, metal wares, wood, and jades demonstrate the strong command of artistry and technique among Islamic artists and craftsmen with changing tastes over the centuries. Sculpture, painting, and luxury objects from South Asia show the interrelated artistic achievements of Jain, Hindu, and Islamic cultures.

The Met's Islamic art collection is substantial. There are more than 2,000 objects with images and many ways to filter results.

Boston has over 3,000 objects created by Islamic cultures worldwide.

The museum – which displays both Turkish and Islamic art – has rare examples from the Emevi, Abbasi, Artuklu, Eyyubi, Ilhanlı, Timurid, Safavi, Kaçar, Memluk, Seljuk and Ottoman periods. Its objects have been collected from throughout the Islamic world, including pristine examples of glassware, stone and terracotta as well as metal and ceramic objects. The museum is famous for having the best rug collection in the world. The masterpieces among the rugs are rare 13th century Seljuk carpets that cannot be found elsewhere.

The V&A is the leading museum of art and design in the West, housing a permanent collection of over 2.3 million objects that span over 5,000 years of human creativity with particular strengths in architecture, furniture, fashion, textiles, photography, sculpture, painting, jewelry, glass, ceramics, book arts, Asian art and design, theatre and performance. [From the website]